Setting up a local geth private consortium

This workshop walks you through setting up a private consortium of geth clients with three members. You can read the official documentation on ethereum private networks.

Disclaimer: The content of this repo is for testing and demo purposes only. Make sure to change the provided genesis.json, accounts, node.key, and static-nodes.json for production in addition to security needs for running a blockchain consortium.

Dependencies

Download Go-Ethereum (geth)

• You can get geth via installers or via package managers
• Make sure you have geth in your path. You can check that by running which geth command.

Download the Ethereum or Mist wallet

• Download Ethereum or Mist Wallet for your operating system

Networkid

You need to choose a netwrokid for your consortium. netwrokid can be an arbituraty number and it has to be passed to all nodes on start --networkid <your network id>. You can read more about it here.

Node 1: miner

To run a blockchain (ethereum) network, you need some nodes to mine (create) blocks. These nodes are called miner nodes. You can read more about mining here.

Initialize the genesis block

Open a new terminal window and run the flowing command.

Note: You only need to initiate geth once per node, after that you can just run the "starting command".

cd geth-consortium-workshop
geth --datadir ./node-1 init genesis.json

By running that command, you have turned the content of genesis.json to the hash for the first block.

Start geth with mining enabled

geth --datadir ./node-1 --mine --minerthreads 2 --nodekey node-1/node.key --networkid <your network id> 

Now you are running a geth node with mining enabled. At this point your geth client is generating the DAG.

Once dag is generated, your miner will start making blocks. All the ether generated from the miner will be deposited in 0xae57095f12fb7e760532eea08486153497f42430 account. The ether on private networks don't have any monetary value.

Node 2: transaction node in console mode

Open a new terminal window and run the following commands:

# Navigate to the cloned project
cd geth-consortium-workshop

# Initialize the genesis block
geth --datadir ./node-2 init genesis.json

# Run geth
geth --datadir ./node-2 --port 30304 --networkid <your network id> console

By running this command, your second node will connect to the miner and download all the created blocks.

Your second node uses the node-2/static-nodes.json file to find the address of the first node. geth has a built-in discovery method, but it takes some time for nodes to discover one another. So we give them a little hint to speed things up.

After you sync up with the other nodes, your client will download 1 block at a time as blocks are generated. You are running your second node in console mode. Here are the cool things you can do in geth console.

Node 3: transaction node with rpc enabled

Open a new terminal window and run the following commands:

# Navigate to the cloned project
cd geth-consortium-workshop

# Initialize the genesis block
geth --datadir ./node-3 init genesis.json

# Windows
geth --datadir ./node-3 --port 30305 --networkid <your network id>

# Mac
geth --datadir ./node-3 --port 30305 --ipcpath ${HOME}/Library/Ethereum/geth.ipc --networkid <your network id> 

Attaching the Ethereum or Mist wallet

Now you can open the Ethereum or mist wallet.

The wallet by default will look for an IPC socket opened by geth in order to communicate. If there is no IPC socket in the expected path (\\.\pipe\geth.ipc on Windows and ${HOME}/Library/Ethereum/geth.ipc on mac) the wallet will run its own geth process to connect to the main network or the test network.

Transferring Ether

Coming soon

Deploying contracts

Coming soon

Attaching to RPC using web3.js

Coming soon

Provided Accounts:

• Main account

  • Address: 0xae57095f12fb7e760532eea08486153497f42430
  • Password: no password (just press enter)

• Account 1

  • Address: 0x62daa5f6974331eebab3970e19598f0e279cfb85
  • Password: 2017

Resetting everything

To reset everything you can:

• a) Delete all the geth folders in node-1, node-2, and node-3 directory
• b) Or do it the easier way git clean -xdf. This command removes all files that are not tracked by git