Introduction

This document describes how to build an Aeternity node from source on current Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and MacOS (latest). The commands below assume you are logged in with sudo user.

The node have couple of main dependencies that have to be install to build it from source:

• Erlang/OTP
• Libsodium

Dependencies

Ubuntu 18.04

Update package database, packages and install the common tools and libraries:

sudo apt-get -qq update \
&& sudo apt-get -y upgrade \
&& sudo apt-get -qq -y install git autoconf build-essential erlang libsodium-dev libgmp-dev

Ubuntu 16.04

Update package database, packages and install the common tools and libraries:

sudo apt-get -qq update \
&& sudo apt-get -y upgrade \
&& sudo apt-get -qq -y install git curl autoconf build-essential ncurses-dev libssl-dev libgmp-dev

As Ubuntu 16.04 ships with outdated erlang and libsodium versions, they have to be installed from source:

OTP_VERSION="20.2.3"
OTP_DOWNLOAD_URL="https://github.com/erlang/otp/archive/OTP-${OTP_VERSION}.tar.gz"
curl -fsSL -o otp-src.tar.gz "$OTP_DOWNLOAD_URL" \
&& mkdir otp-src \
&& tar -zxf otp-src.tar.gz -C otp-src --strip-components=1 \
&& cd otp-src \
&& export ERL_TOP=`pwd` \
&& ./otp_build autoconf && ./configure && make -j$(nproc) && sudo make install \
&& cd ..

LIBSODIUM_VERSION="1.0.16"
LIBSODIUM_DOWNLOAD_URL="https://github.com/jedisct1/libsodium/releases/download/${LIBSODIUM_VERSION}/libsodium-${LIBSODIUM_VERSION}.tar.gz"
curl -fsSL -o libsodium-src.tar.gz "$LIBSODIUM_DOWNLOAD_URL" \
&& mkdir libsodium-src \
&& tar -zxf libsodium-src.tar.gz -C libsodium-src --strip-components=1 \
&& cd libsodium-src \
&& ./configure && make -j$(nproc) \
&& sudo make install \
&& sudo ldconfig \
&& cd ..

MacOS

The easiest way to install package on MacOS is Homebrew, it can be installed by running:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Then install the build dependencies using the brew command:

brew update
brew install erlang@21 openssl libsodium autoconf gmp

Building

The source code of the Aeternity node can be obtained by cloning the public GitHub repository:

git clone https://github.com/aeternity/aeternity.git aeternity_source && cd aeternity_source

NOTE: By default git will checkout the master (default) branch of the source code. To build a particular version it should be checkout first:

VERSION=X.Y.Z # set a particular version
git checkout tags/v${VERSION:?}

Production build

One can create a production build by running:

make prod-build

Make sure beneficiary account is set in configuration, as this is mandatory to successfully start a node. There is no default beneficiary configured.

See configuration documentation for configuration details.

If prod-build went fine, configuration is in place, one should be able to navigate to the build artifacts directory and start the Aeternity node:

cd _build/prod/rel/aeternity/
bin/aeternity start

See operation documentation for more details.

Production package

Alternatively a production package similar to what is distributed via GitHub releases can be created by running:

make prod-package

Once the packaging is done, the package is created in the _build/prod/rel/aeternity/ directory, e.g. _build/prod/rel/aeternity/aeternity-X.Y.Z.tar.gz.

To deploy the package for example in ~/aeternity/node one should just unarchive it to that directory:

mkdir -p ~/aeternity/node
tar xf _build/prod/rel/aeternity/aeternity-*.tar.gz -C ~/aeternity/node

Make sure beneficiary account is set in configuration, as this is mandatory to successfully start a node. There is no default beneficiary configured.

See configuration documentation for configuration details.

Then start the node:

~/aeternity/node/bin/aeternity start

See operation documentation for more details.