Tezos—A self-amending cryptographic ledger

Build instructions

To compile Tezos, you need an OCaml compiler (version 4.04.2) and all the libraries listed in the various tezos-*.opam files.

The best way to install all dependencies is by first installing OPAM, the OCaml package manager.

Then, you need to create a new switch alias for Tezos. A switch is your own version of the OPAM configuration, including the OCaml compiler, all packages, and package manager configuration related to your project. This is necessary so that the project doesn’t conflict with other OCaml projects or other versions of Tezos.

Note that if you previously created a switch named tezos but with an older OCaml version you need to remove the switch with opam switch remove "tezos".

When the switch is ready, you need to activate it:

Install the libraries which Tezos depends on:

While building the dependencies, opam is able to handle correctly the OCaml libraries but it is not always able to handle all external C libraries we depend on. On most system, it is able to suggest a call to the system package manager but it currently does not handle version check. In particular, the libsodium-dev packages on Ubuntu is too old for building Tezos, we rely on version 1.0.11 at least.

At last, compile the project:

This should produce three binaries:

tezos-node: the tezos daemon itself;
tezos-client: a minimal command-line client;
tezos-protocol-compiler: a protocol compiler used for developing new version of the economic protocol.

Currently Tezos is being developed for Linux only. It should work on mac OS, but it has not been tested recently. A Windows port is in progress.

Note that, when executing make build-deps, OPAM will detect if required system dependencies are installed. However, it is not able to detect which versions you actually have. Typically, make will probably fail if you have an libsodium < 1.0.11. In this case, make sure you have a recent version of libsodium and libsodium-dev, or download and install them from, eg,https://pkgs.org/download/libsodium18 and https://pkgs.org/download/libsodium-dev

Running the node

So far there is no official Tezos network being run, but you might run a local test network (the development team is running its own testnet, if you’re interested in joining this network, please make a request on our slack channel. We have limited support abilities at the moment but we’ll try to help you best we can).

Use the following command to run a node that will accept incoming connections:

This will first generate a new node identity and compute the associated stamp of proof-of-work. Then, the node will listen to connections coming in on [::]:9732. All used data is stored at $HOME/.tezos-node/. For example, the default configuration file is at $HOME/.tezos-node/config.json.

To run multiple nodes on the same machine, you can duplicate and edit $HOME/.tezos-node/config.json while making sure they don’t share paths to the database or any other data file (cf. options db.store ; db.context ; db.protocol, net.peers-metadata and net.identity).

You could also let Tezos generate a config file by specifying options on the command line. For instance, if $dir/config.jsondoes not exist, the following command will generate it and replace the default values with the values from the command line:

The Tezos server has a built-in mechanism to discover peers on the local network (using UDP packets broadcasted on port 7732).

If this mechanism is not sufficient, one can provide Tezos with a list of initial peers, either by editing the option net.bootstrap-peers in the config.json file, or by specifying a command line parameter:

If "$dir"/config.json exists, the command line options override those read in the config file. By default, Tezos won’t modify the content of an existing "$dir"/config.json file. But, you may explicit ask the node to reset or to update the file according to the command line parameters with the following commands line:

Running the node in a sandbox

To run a ‘localhost-only’ instance of a Tezos network, we provide two helper scripts:

./bin_node/tezos-sandboxed-node.sh
./bin_client/tezos-init-sandboxed-client.sh

For instance, if you want to run local network with two nodes, in a first terminal, the following command will initialize a node listening for peers on port 19731 and listening for RPC on port 18731.

This node will store its data in a temporary directory which will be removed when the node is killed.

To launch the second node, just run the following command, it will listen on port 19739 and 18739:

You might replace 1 or 9 by any number in between if you want to run more than two nodes. But, if you intend to run a single node network, you might remove the spurious “Too few connections” warnings by lowering the number of expected connection, by running the following command instead:

Once your node(s) is/are running, open a new terminal and initialize the “sandboxed” client data:

It will initialize the client data in a temporary directory. It will also defines in the current shell session an alias tezos-clientpreconfigured for communicating the same-numbered node. For instance:

When you bootstrap a new network, the network is initialized with a dummy economic protocol, called “genesis”. If you want to run the same protocol than the alphanet, init-sandboxed-client also defines an alias tezos-activate-alpha, that you need to execute once for activating the whole network. For instance:

Configuration options

Here is an example configuration file with all parameters specified. Most of the time it uses default values, except for cases where the default is not explanatory enough (i.e. “bootstrap-peers” is an empty list by default). Comments are not allowed in JSON, so this configuration file would not parse. They are just provided here to help writing your own configuration file if needed.

Debugging

It is possible to set independant log levels for different logging sections in Tezos, as well as specifying an output file for logging. See the description of log parameters above as well as documentation under the DEBUG section diplayed by `tezos-node run –help’.

JSON/RPC interface

The Tezos node provides a JSON/RPC interface. Note that it is an RPC, and it is JSON based, but it does not follow the “JSON-RPC” protocol. It is not active by default and it must be explicitely activated with the --rpc-addr option. Typically, if you are not trying to run a local network and just want to explore the RPC, you would run:

The RPC interface is self-documented and the tezos-client executable is able to pretty-print the RPC API. For instance, to see the API provided by the Tezos Shell: