The first step to setting up an Ethereum development environment is running a node.Public nodes run by MyEtherWalletand Augur are great public services. However, you cannot always attachyour private keys securely to such a node, and so you are limited to read-onlyinteractions (reading contract variables, checking account balances).Moreover, you cannot always upload contracts reliably due to(Solidity) compiler incompatibilities.
While technically leeching, light clients are important for the long-term viability, popularity and utility of a network like Ethereum. As the user base broadens there will be increasing numbers of people unwilling and unable to use full clients. There will be demand for full nodes that don’t require all the data baggage accumulated since. Sometimes, developers don’t have time to wait for their computer to synchronize the entire Ethereum Blockchain, or need to have a server running an Ethereum node to feed their site or DAPP. In this guide, we’ll focus on getting an Ethereum node set up using the Ethereum Light Client, Parity, on Ubuntu 14.04.
The most reliable option is to run your own node.
You can run a node locally on your laptop or local computer, such as describedin the Christmas classic How To Get on Rinkeby Testnet in 10 minutes.However this won't work for people who are behind a firewall that does not permit incoming public TCP/UDP connectionson port 30303 (the default), or any new port. Like many home users on their ISP's network.Also, are you expected to just keep your laptop open and running all the time, draining battery power andhogging your coffeeshop's wifi, like a chump? No way!
The answer is to let the world's most too-powerful tech company run your node for you, for free. (Way!)
This write-up will teach you how to run an Ethereum node on Google Cloud Product (GCP).
Google Cloud Product
Create a New Account
You can get a free 1 year trial with $300 worth of credit by signing up with a new email address. Don't worry, you'll be prompted when your free trial expires before your credit card gets charged.If you own your own domain, you can create an infinite supply of email addresses to make bot accounts. (Disclaimer: I neither endorse nor condemn this course of action 👿 )
Agree and Verify
You'll get a popup asking you if it's okay that they snoop on what restaurants you search for and your current location on your Android phone.(How do you think they got to be the world's most too-powerful company). Do you want to run a free node or not?Pray a hail mary and make peace with your bot's lost privacy, then click
I Agree
.Check your email and click the link to verify your account. You'll be taken to your Google Cloud console,but you can get there by going to http://cloud.google.com and clicking
Console
Console
The console is your central landing page where you'll start every time you work with GCP.Here you can view all your current services and their usage, as well as create / add new services,access your cloud shell, edit your profile, access your billing settings, etc.
Agree to the Terms of Service (you should probably skim it).
Note the banner that says
Keep an eye on this every time you sign in. You'll see it go down over time.It's pretty hard to make it last one year in my experience.
Virtual Machine
The available services you can run on GCP are grouped into categories. These include databases, message queues, and lots of fancy stuff.We'll start with the most basic service, compute.
The basic unit of compute on GCP is a Virtual Machine.Think of it as a dynamically allocated Linux computer that you can initialize and tear down on demand.We'll use Ubuntu because of its widespread community support, especially on the Ethereum wiki.It also has a large number of available packages so you can download and install your favorite toolswith
apt
.On the left sidebar menu, under the
Compute Engine
section you can choose VM Instances
, or you cannavigate directly to https://console.cloud.google.com/projectselector/compute/instancesYou'll see the following screen to create a project (call it something like
Ethereum Node
) and click Create
.A project is a collection of instantiated services that are running, with real data, and are consumingboth resources like CPU and RAM on Google's machines as well as using up money in your $300 free trial.
You can have multiple projects to work on multiple apps or systems simultaneously.For example after this tutorial is over, you might create another project to run a Bitcoin node as well.We'll just assume we are working with a single
Ethereum Node
project for now.If you get lost below, you can always return to your projects by clicking on
Console
Enable Billing
You'll be taken to a screen where you will again be tempted to sign up for spamand you sign away more rights, in case you managed to smuggle them past the other
Agree
buttons that you clicked.After you click
Agree and continue
enter in your customer info, including your credit card info (not shown, lol).This won't be charged after your free trial is over. It's probably just used to verify your identity and safeguard againstyou using GCP for any illegal purpose.Then click
Start my free trial
, and get a nice welcome.Tour the Console
Go ahead and click
Tour the console
to get a basic primer on how to work this thing.I'll wait. It might not work, i.e. you get a message that saysSad. Anyway, when you're ready, return to the
VM Instances
dashboard.Create New VM Instances
Back in your project dashboard, you'll be given an option to create new VMs.There are other options too (import and take the quickstart) but don't do those right now.
Import
would let you import other VM instances, e.g. from other projects or other GCP users, or snapshots of even this project in the past.Take the quickstart
would let you build a sample app.In the next screen, you'll get to choose the operating system image.The default is Debian 9, but as discussed above, we'll use Ubuntu.However, if you're experienced and want to run with a more barebones image that you can customizelike Debian, etc. you can choose those as well. You're on your own as far as the rest of this tutorial is concerned, however.
Note the helpful hint on the right sidebar that this VM instance will consume $24.67 per month of your free trial.
Click
Change
and select Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
as well.Accept the other defaults.
Then finally click
Create
.Log Into VM
You'll be returned to the VM instances dashboard where you can see your instance running.Choose to SSH (log in via secure shell) by choosing
Open in browser window
.The following window will pop up. Congrats! You are now at a normal command-line shell (
bash
) that you can use to control your VM instance.This is our goal, a Linux computer for running an Ethereum node that is beyond your ISP's firewall.There is still a firewall of course, but this one is run by Google and is configurable per GCP user and per project.
You have a lot of control over this.Congrats! This concludes the first, and longer, part of the tutorial.
Ethereum Node
At this point, you can stop and use any other tutorial for starting up an Ethereum node(including running a Rinkeby node as described here).Those instructions are agnostic to what computer the node is running on, so just substitute all mentions of 'laptop' for 'GCP node' instead.They are manual ways of running an Ethereum node.
Install the latest Ethereum software.
Run
tmux
to get two simultaneous pains.Start up Geth
Start up a light geth node in one
tmux
pane.You'll get a lot of output, perhaps after 20 seconds of silence when you're beginning to suspect that you have to open a firewall port after all.But you don't.
Eventually you'll see something like this:
If you check Ethstats you'll see that you're now in sync with the main blockchain.
Attach a Console
In
Posted by1 year ago
Archived
How to set up and launch Ethereum Wallet in light mode with one click [Windows]
Did you know that Ethereum Wallet can be launched in a mode where downloading the entire blockchain is not needed, allowing for near instant sync? Here's a guide on how to create a one-button launch for this, just because I didn't find all this info in one place.
Requirements: You'll need a version of Ethereum Wallet installed.
Right click in your desktop, pick 'new' and then 'shortcut'. Type in 'CMD' and then hit the Enter key, press 'Finish'. Now right click on that shortcut, select 'properties' and in the 'Target field input the following:
Let's name this shortcut GethL.
If you have a hard time finding your geth file then try looking by pressing Windows Key&R and then typing in %appdata%.
Then you'll need to create a batch file to also launch your wallet following the launch of geth with the above parameters. Right click on your desktop, New, Text Document and type in the following:
And then go to notepad's file menu, press save as, name your file Ethereum Light Node.bat and Save as type should be 'All Files (.)'.
Info in <> needs to be replaced with your info.
The light feature is experimental and some users have reported that it doesn't work properly on the latest version of the wallet. Use at your own risk.
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