How to run a Grin node

This page is intended to provide basic instructions on how to get started running a Grin node.

Prerequisites

Downloading the Software

The latest Grin release can be found on the project Release Page. Binaries are currently provided for Linux and OSX.

Distribution-specific releases will likely appear over time, and will be listed here.

Installation

Linux (all distributions)

Download the zipped binary to your machine, and unzip it using the terminal. This will unzip a single file called grin, which contains both the server and wallet software.

For now, we'd recommend placing this somewhere relative to your home directory, and editing your path environment variable to ensure the grin executable is available from wherever you run it. All of this can be done by running the following commands in the directory to which you downloaded grin.

tar xzf grin-v0.5.0-473188413-linux-amd64.tgz
mkdir ~/grin
cp grin ~/grin
echo export PATH=~/grin:$PATH >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Running a Grin Node

After following the installation steps, simply run Grin:

grin

Or, to run a Floonet (i.e. test network) node:

grin --floonet

And that is it! The Grin TUI (Text-User-Interface) should appear and your node should automatically sync up with the blockchain.

Configuring your Grin node

By default, your Grin node keeps all of its configuration files and data in the ~/.grin directory under your user home. The main server configuration file can be found in the file ~/.grin/grin-server.toml. This file is fully documented, and contains many configuration options for your Grin server. Leaving these values at their defaults should work for most people who simply want to run a node.

Further Help

You can view further details on the various commmand-line options available from grin using the help command:

grin help grin server help grin wallet help