This guide outlines how to deploy the explorer using a local lh-geth testnet. Utilized postgres, redis and little_bigtable as data storage

Install docker

If you never worked with Docker, this short video gives an overview to understand roughly what we will do with it.

Now, let us install it:

sudo apt update
sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl gnupg
sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg
sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg
echo \
  "deb [arch="$(dpkg --print-architecture)" signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
  "$(. /etc/os-release && echo "$VERSION_CODENAME")" stable" | \
  sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

Install kurtosis-cli

Kurtosis is a software which will launch the different parts of a test network and the beaconcha.in explorer, all running locally, using Docker. You will not have to deal with it (nor with Docker), because automating the launch of interdependent modules with Docker and configuring them is the point of Kurtosis. This short video gives an overview if it is your first time.

Now, let us install it:

echo "deb [trusted=yes] https://apt.fury.io/kurtosis-tech/ /" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kurtosis.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install kurtosis-cli

Install golang

You will find the last version of Go on this page. The commands that you will type to install it will look like this:

wget https://go.dev/dl/go1.21.4.linux-amd64.tar.gz
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/go && sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.21.4.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Add the golang binaries to the path by adding the following lines to your ~/.profile file and then logout & login again.

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin
export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/go/bin

The second line is not mentionned in the installation instructions of Go's website but will be necessary for our system. Before continuing, restarting your computer now might save you from unexplained errors during the next steps.

Clone the explorer repository

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/gobitfly/eth2-beaconchain-explorer.git
cd eth2-beaconchain-explorer

Build the explorer binaries

sudo apt install build-essential
make all

Start postgres, redis, little_bigtable & the eth test network

cd ~/eth2-beaconchain-explorer/local-deployment/
kurtosis clean -a && kurtosis run --enclave my-testnet . "$(cat network-params.json)"

Later in your developer life (after having started Kurtosis and stopped it a few times), if you encounter an error at this step, you might need to clean up bugged cache files from previous runs that Kurtosis or Docker left behind. The ./stop script in this repository gathers cleaning commands which worked for their author (it might save you hours of browsing Stack Overflow and GitHub's issues).

Generate the explorer config file for the deployed testnet

cd ~/eth2-beaconchain-explorer/local-deployment/
bash provision-explorer-config.sh

This will generate a config.yml to be used by the explorer and then create the bigtable & postgres schema.

Start the explorer modules

cd ~/eth2-beaconchain-explorer/local-deployment/
docker compose up -d

You can start / stop the exporter submodules using docker compose

Convenience-script run.sh

Above, we have started / stopped the local chain + the explorer manually. The run.sh script in this directory can be used to start and stop everything automatically. Just run ./run.sh start to start the whole system, wait a bit and browse http://localhost:8080 to see it in action. You can run ./run.sh sql to explore the sql-database. Everything can be stopped and cleaned up with ./run.sh stop.

Exit validators

Exiting individual validators can be done using the provided exit_validator.sh script. Requires https://github.com/wealdtech/ethdo to be available on the path.

bash exit_validators.sh -i validator_index -m "memonic" -b "http://bn_api_host:bn_api_port"

Enabling withdrawals

First, install JQ and eth2-val-tools:

sudo apt install jq
go get github.com/protolambda/eth2-val-tools@master
go install github.com/protolambda/eth2-val-tools@master

To enable withdrawals for specific validators in your local network, we provide the script add_withdrawal_address.sh. It creates and submits a BLS-to-execution-layer-address-change message. The script needs some arguments:

cd ~/eth2-beaconchain-explorer/local-deployment/scripts
bash add_withdrawal_address.sh -a "ETH address" -m "mnemonic" -b "URL" -i validator_index

• -a: Followed by a string representing an ETH address prefixed with "0x" (for example an address that you generated with an online tool – for safety reasons, never use online generators for real applications).
• -m: Followed by a string representing the validator mnemonic. The one used to create the initial set of validators can be found in the network-params.json file, see preregistered_validator_keys_mnemonic.
• -b: Followed by a string representing the URL to the consensus client. The URL is logged by Kurtosis when it starts. Once everything is running, search for cl-1-lighthouse-geth on your console and look for something like http: 4000/tcp -> http://127.0.0.1:32779. The end of the line shows the URL that the parameter -b needs.
• -i: Followed by a number representing the index of the validator you want to activate withdrawals for. The amount of validators created can be also found in the network-params.json file, see num_validator_keys_per_node. For 64 validators, the indexes range from 0 to 63.

Here is an example:

cd ~/eth2-beaconchain-explorer/local-deployment/scripts
bash add_withdrawal_addr.sh -a "0x0701BF988309bf45a6771afaa6B8802Ba3E24090" -m "giant issue aisle success illegal bike spike question tent bar rely arctic volcano long crawl hungry vocal artwork sniff fantasy very lucky have athlete" -b "http://localhost:32779" -i 42