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Getting started

Introduction

Bcoin is an alternative implementation of the Bitcoin protocol, written in JavaScript and C/C++ for Node.js. It is a full node which can be used for full blockchain validation and is aware of all known consensus rules.

Requirements

  • Linux, macOS, or Windows (*)
  • node.js >=v10.0.0
  • gpk >= v2 or npm >= v6
  • python2 or python3 (for node-gyp)
  • gcc/g++ (for leveldb/bdb and secp256k1/bcrypto)
  • git

(*): Note that Bcoin works best with unix-like OSes, and has not yet been thoroughly tested on Windows. The BSDs and Solaris have also not been tested yet, but should work in theory.

Build & install

Bcoin is meant to be installed via Git for security purposes, as there are security issues when installing via npm. To support signature verification, gpk can be used to replace usage of npm. All tagged commits for a release should be signed by release maintainers. Signed copies and source of Node.js are available from nodejs.org, or from your respective OS's package repositories.

You can add the necessary public keys using gpg:

gpg --recv-keys "<fingerprint>"

Installing via Git

$ git clone https://github.com/bcoin-org/bcoin
$ cd bcoin

To verify and checkout a specific release:

$ git tag
$ git tag -v <version>
$ git checkout <version>

You can also verify signatures using:

$ git log --show-signature

Build and install globally with npm:

$ npm rebuild
$ npm install --global

Or with gpk:

$ gpk rebuild
$ gpk install --global

Note: If you're updating a repository it is necessary to rebuild again if any dependencies with native addons have been updated.

Installing via GPK

To support signature verification, you can use gpk to replace the use of npm.

To install bcoin globally and to your path:

$ gpk install --global https://github.com/bcoin-org/bcoin

To install bcoin as a dependency, you can create a new package.json with:

$ gpk init

And then add bcoin with:

$ gpk install https://github.com/bcoin-org/bcoin

The latest tagged version will be added to package.json and bcoin will be installed.

See GPK documentation for further details on usage.

Installing on Debian/Ubuntu

Install the necessary dependencies in addition to Node.js:

apt-get install build-essential python

Installing via Docker

Check bcoin-docker

Installing on Windows

When installing Node.js via the Windows Installer, ensure that the additional build tools are installed during the process, it will install Python and other build tools.

Also install Git that will include the command git as well as gpg via the Git bash shell.

Use as a dependency

It is recommended to specify bcoin as a git dependency with semantic versioning and include a mirror in the git tree for integrity and availability. For example, here is an example package.json:

{
  "dependencies": {
    "bcoin": "git+https://github.com/bcoin-org/bcoin.git#semver:~2.0.0"
  }
}

While git tags are signed, npm will not check the signature of the git tag. You can use gpk instead.

Starting up your first bcoin node

If bcoin is installed globally, $ bcoin should be in your PATH. If not, the bcoin bootstrap script resides in /path/to/bcoin/bin/bcoin.

$ bcoin

Will run a bcoin node as the foreground process, displaying all debug logs.

To run as a daemon:

$ bcoin --daemon

This will start up a full node, complete with: a blockchain, mempool, miner, p2p server, wallet server, and an HTTP REST+RPC server.

All logs will be written to ~/.bcoin/debug.log by default.

By default, the http server will only listen on 127.0.0.1:8332. No auth will be required if an API key was not passed in. If you listen on any other host, auth will be required and an API key will be auto-generated if one was not passed in.

Listening externally

To listen publicly on the HTTP server, --http-host=0.0.0.0 (ipv4) or --http-host=:: (ipv4 and ipv6) can be passed. Additionally this: --http-port=1337 can set the port.

To advertise your node on the P2P network --public-host=[your-public-ip] and --public-port=[your-public-port] may be passed.

Using an API Key

If listening publicly on the HTTP server, an API key is required. One will be randomly generated if no key was chosen, but not explicitly reported to the user. An API key can be chosen with the --api-key option.

Example:

$ bcoin --http-host=0.0.0.0 --api-key hunter2 --daemon

API keys are used with HTTP Basic Auth:

$ curl http://x:hunter2@localhost:8332/

If bcoin is installed globally, both bcoin-cli and bwallet-cli should be on your path.

$ bcoin-cli info --api-key hunter2
$ bcoin-cli rpc getblockchaininfo --api-key hunter2
$ bwallet-cli balance

Using Tor/SOCKS

Bcoin has native support for SOCKS proxies, and will accept a --proxy option in the format of --proxy=[user]:[pass]@host:port.

Passing the --onion option tells bcoin that the SOCKS proxy is a Tor socks proxy, and will enable Tor resolution for DNS lookups, as well as try to connect to .onion addresses found on the P2P network.

$ bcoin --proxy joe:[email protected]:9050 --onion

Running bcoin as a Tor hidden service

Your hidden service must first be configured with tor. Once you have the .onion address, it can be passed into --public-host in the form of --public-host foo.onion.

Note: Use of both --proxy and a hidden service at the same time is currently not yet supported.

Target nodes

It's often desirable to run behind several trusted bitcoin nodes. To select permanent nodes to connect to, the --nodes option is available:

$ bcoin --nodes foo.example.com:8333,1.2.3.4:8333,5.6.7.8:8333

If chosen, bcoin will always try to connect to these nodes as outbound peers. They are top priority and whitelisted (not susceptible to permanent bans, only disconnections).

To only connect to these nodes, use --only

$ bcoin --only foo.example.com,1.2.3.4,5.6.7.8

Disabling listening

To avoid accepting connections on the P2P network altogether, --listen=false can be passed to bcoin.

Selfish mode

Bcoin also supports a "selfish" mode. In this mode, bcoin still has full blockchain and mempool validation, but network services are disabled: it will not relay transactions or serve blocks to anyone.

$ bcoin --selfish --listen=false

Note: Selfish mode is not recommended. We encourage you to help the network by relaying transactions and blocks. At the same time, selfish mode does have its uses if you do not have the bandwidth to spare, or if you're absolutely worried about potential DoS attacks.

Further configuration

See Configuration.

Maintainers

  • Christopher Jeffrey (B4B1 F62D BAC0 84E3 33F3 A04A 8962 AB9D E666 6BBD)
  • Braydon Fuller (5B7D C58D 90FE C1E9 90A3 10BA F24F 232D 108B 3AD4)
  • Matthew Zipkin (E617 73CD 6E01 040E 2F1B D78C E7E2 984B 6289 C93A)