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Setting Up A Celestia Consensus Full Node

Consensus Full Nodes allow you to sync blockchain history in the Celestia Consensus Layer.

Hardware Requirements​

The following hardware minimum requirements are recommended for running the Consensus Full Node:

  • Memory: 8 GB RAM
  • CPU: Quad-Core
  • Disk: 250 GB SSD Storage
  • Bandwidth: 1 Gbps for Download/100 Mbps for Upload

Setting Up Your Consensus Full Node​

The following tutorial is done on an Ubuntu Linux 20.04 (LTS) x64 instance machine.

Setup The Dependencies​

Follow the instructions on installing the dependencies here.

Deploying The Celestia App​

This section describes part 1 of Celestia Validator Node setup: running a Celestia App daemon with an internal Celestia Core node.

Note: Make sure you have at least 100+ Gb of free space to safely install+run the Validator Node.

Install Celestia App​

Follow the tutorial on installing Celestia App here.

Setup the P2P Networks​

For this section of the guide, select the network you want to connect to:

After that, you can proceed with the rest of the tutorial.

Configure Pruning​

For lower disk space usage we recommend setting up pruning using the configurations below. You can change this to your own pruning configurations if you want:

PRUNING="custom"
PRUNING_KEEP_RECENT="100"
PRUNING_INTERVAL="10"

sed -i -e "s/^pruning *=.*/pruning = \"$PRUNING\"/" $HOME/.celestia-app/config/app.toml
sed -i -e "s/^pruning-keep-recent *=.*/pruning-keep-recent = \
\"$PRUNING_KEEP_RECENT\"/" $HOME/.celestia-app/config/app.toml
sed -i -e "s/^pruning-interval *=.*/pruning-interval = \
\"$PRUNING_INTERVAL\"/" $HOME/.celestia-app/config/app.toml

Reset Network​

This will delete all data folders so we can start fresh:

celestia-appd tendermint unsafe-reset-all --home $HOME/.celestia-app

Optional: Quick-Sync with Snapshot​

Syncing from Genesis can take a long time, depending on your hardware. Using this method you can synchronize your Celestia node very quickly by downloading a recent snapshot of the blockchain. If you would like to sync from the Genesis, then you can skip this part.

If you want to use snapshot, determine the network you would like to sync to from the list below:

Start the Celestia App​

In order to start your consensus full node, run the following:

celestia-appd start

This will let you sync the Celestia blockchain history.

Optional: Configure For RPC Endpoint​

You can configure your Consensus Full Node to be a public RPC endpoint and listen to any connections from Data Availability Nodes in order to serve requests for the Data Availability API here.

Note that you would need to ensure port 9090 is open for this.

Run the following commands:

EXTERNAL_ADDRESS=$(wget -qO- eth0.me)
sed -i.bak -e "s/^external-address = \"\"/external-address = \"$EXTERNAL_ADDRESS:26656\"/" $HOME/.celestia-app/config/config.toml
sed -i 's#"tcp://127.0.0.1:26657"#"tcp://0.0.0.0:26657"#g' ~/.celestia-app/config/config.toml

Restart celestia-appd in the previous step to load those configs.

Start the Celestia-App with SystemD​

Follow the tutorial on setting up Celestia-App as a background process with SystemD here.