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Grin - Build, Configuration, and Running

Building

Supported Platforms

Note that it's still too early in development to declare 'officially supported' plaforms, but at the moment, the situation is:

  • Linux - Primary platform (x86 only, at present), as most development and testing is happening here
  • Mac OS - Known to work, but may be slight hiccups
  • Windows - Known to compile, but working status unknown, and not a focus for the development team at present. Note that no mining plugins will be present on a Windows system after building Grin.

The instructions below will assume a Linux system.

Build Prerequisites

In order to compile and run Grin on your machine, you should have installed:

  • Git - to clone the repository
  • cmake - 3.2 or greater should be installed and on your $PATH. Used by the build to compile the mining plugins found in the included Cuckoo Miner
  • Rust - via Rustup - Can be installed via your package manager or manually via the following commands:
    curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
    source $HOME/.cargo/env

Build Instructions (Linux/Unix)

Clone Grin

git clone https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin.git

Build Grin

cd grin
cargo build

Cuckoo-Miner considerations

If you're having issues with building cuckoo-miner plugins (which will usually manifest as a lot of C errors when building the grin_pow crate, you can turn mining plugin builds off by editing the file `pow/Cargo.toml' as follows:

#uncomment this feature to turn off plugin builds
features=["no-plugin-build"]

This may help when building on 32 bit systems or non x86 architectures. You can still use the internal miner to mine by setting:

use_cuckoo_miner = false

In grin.toml

What have I just built?

Provided all of the prerequisites were installed and there were no issues, there should be 3 things in your project directory that you need to pay attention to in order to configure and run grin. These are:

  • The Grin binary, which should be located in your project directory as target/debug/grin

  • A set of mining plugins, which should be in the 'plugins' directory located next to the grin executable

  • A configuration file in the root project directory named grin.toml

By default, executing:

cargo run

from the build directory will run grin using the defaults in the grin.toml file, creating a new blockchain locally and mining using a simple version of the embedded miner.

For the time being, it's recommended just to put the built version of grin on your path, e.g. via:

export PATH=/path/to/grin/dir/target/debug:$PATH

Configuration

Grin is currently configured via a combination of configuration file and command line switches, with any provided switches overriding the contents of the configuration file. To see a list of commands and switches use:

grin help

At startup, grin looks for a configuration file called 'grin.toml' in the following places in the following order, using the first one it finds:

  • The current working directory
  • The directory in which the grin executable is located
  • {USER_HOME}/.grin

If no configuration file is found, command line switches must be given to grin in order to start it. If a configuration file is found but no command line switches are provided, grin starts in server mode using the values found in the configuration file.

At present, the relevant modes of operation are 'server' and 'wallet'. When running in server mode, any command line switches provided will override the values found in the configuration file. Running in wallet mode does not currently use any values from the configuration file.

Basic Execution

For a basic example simulating a single node network, create a directory called 'node1' and change your working directory to it. You'll use this directory to run a wallet and create a new blockchain via a server running in mining mode.

Before running your mining server, a wallet server needs to be set up and listening so that the mining server knows where to send mining rewards. Do this from the first node directory with the following commands:

node1$ grin wallet init
node1$ grin wallet -p "password" receive

See wallet for more info on the various Grin wallet commands and options.

This will create a wallet server listening on the default port 13416 with the password "password". Next, in another terminal window in the 'node1' directory, run a full mining node with the following command:

node1$ grin server -m run

This creates a new .grin database directory in the current directory, and begins mining new blocks (with no transactions, for now). Note this starts two services listening on two default ports, port 13414 for the peer-to-peer (P2P) service which keeps all nodes synchronized, and 13413 for the Rest API service used to verify transactions and post new transactions to the pool (for example). These ports can be configured via command line switches, or via a grin.toml file in the working directory.

Let the mining server find a few blocks, then stop (just ctrl-c) the mining server and the wallet server. You'll notice grin has created a database directory (.grin) in which the blockchain and peer data is stored. There should also be a wallet.dat file in the current directory, which contains a few coinbase mining rewards created each time the server mines a new block.

Advanced Example

The following outlines a more advanced example simulating a multi-server network with transactions being posted.

For the sake of example, we're going to run three nodes with varying setups. Create two more directories beside your node1 directory, called node2 and node3. If you want to clear data from your previous run (or anytime you want to reset the blockchain and all peer data) just delete the wallet.dat file in the server1 directory and run rm -rf .grin to remove grin's database.

Node 1: Genesis and Miner

As before, node 1 will create the blockchain and begin mining. As we'll be running many servers from the same machine, we'll configure specific ports for other servers to explicitly connect to.

First, we run a wallet server to receive rewards on port 15000 (we'll log in debug mode for more information about what's happening)

node1$ grin wallet -p "password" -r 15000 receive

Then we start node 1 mining with its P2P server bound to port 10000 and its api server at 10001. We also provide our wallet address where we'll receive mining rewards. In another terminal:

node1$ grin server -m -p 10000 -a 10001 -w "http://127.0.0.1:15000" run

Node 2: Regular Node (not mining)

We'll set up Node 2 as a simple validating node (i.e. it won't mine,) but we'll pass in the address of node 1 as a seed. Node 2 will join the network founded by node 1 and then sync its blockchain and peer data.

In a new terminal, tell node 2 to run a sever using node 1's P2P address as a seed. Node 2's P2P server will run on port 20000 and its API server will run on port 20001.

node2$ grin server -s "127.0.0.1:10000" -p 20000 -a 20001 run

Node 2 will then sync and process and validate new blocks that node 1 may find.

Node 3: Regular node running wallet listener

Similar to Node 2, we'll set up node 3 as a non-mining node seeded with node 2 (node 1 could also be used). However, we'll also run another wallet in listener mode on this node:

node3$ grin server -s "127.0.0.1:20000" -p 30000 -a 30001 run

Node 3 is now running it's P2P service on port 30000 and its API server on 30001. You should be able to see it syncing its blockchain and peer data with nodes 1 and 2. Now start up a wallet listener.

node3$ grin wallet -p "password" -a "http://127.0.0.1:10001" -r 35000 receive

In contrast to other blockchains, a feature of a MimbleWimble is that a transaction cannot just be directly posted to the blockchain. It first needs to be sent from the sender to the receiver, who will add a blinding factor before posting it to the blockchain. The above command tells the wallet server to listen for transactions on port 35000, and, after applying it's own blinding factor to the transaction, forward them on to the listening API server on node 1. (NB: we should theoretically be able to post transactions to node 3 or 2, but for some reason transactions posted to peers don't seem to propagate properly at present)

Node 1 - Send money to node 3

With all of your servers happily running and your terminals scrolling away, let's spend some of the coins mined in node 1 by sending them to node 3's listening wallet.

In yet another terminal in node 1's directory, create a new partial transaction spending 20000 coins and send them on to node 3's wallet listener. We'll also specify that we'll use node 2's API listener to validate our transaction inputs before sending:

node1$ grin wallet -p "password" -a "http://127.0.0.1:20001" send 20000 -d "http://127.0.0.1:35000"

Your terminal windows should all light up now. Node 1 will check its inputs against node 2, and then send a partial transaction to node 3's wallet listener. Node 3 has been configured to send signed and finalised transactions to the api listener on node 1, which should then add the transaction to the next block and validate it via mining.

You can feel free to try any number of permutations or combinations of the above, just note that grin is very new and under active development, so your mileage may vary. You can also use a separate 'grin.toml' file in each server directory to simplify command line switches.