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Setting up a Celestia full storage Node

This tutorial will guide you through setting up a Celestia Full Storage Node, which is a celestia-node that doesn't connect to celestia-app (hence not a full node) but stores all the data.

Overview of full storage nodes​

Full Storage nodes are Celestia nodes that store all the data. Full Storage nodes send block shares, headers, and fraud proofs to Light Nodes. The Light Nodes gossip headers, fraud proofs, and sometimes block shares, between one another.

Full storage node

Hardware requirements​

The following hardware minimum requirements are recommended for running the full storage node:

  • Memory: 32 GB RAM
  • CPU: 6 cores
  • Disk: 5 TB SSD Storage (Recommended 10 TB SSD Storage)
  • Bandwidth: 1 Gbps for Download/1 Gbps for Upload

Setting up your full storage node​

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

Setup the dependencies​

You can follow the tutorial for setting up your dependencies here

Install celestia-node​

Note: Make sure that you have at least 250+ Gb of free space for Celestia full storage node

You can follow the tutorial for installing celestia-node here

Run the full storage node​

Initialize the full storage node​

Run the following command:

celestia full init

Start the full storage node​

Start the full storage node with a connection to a validator node's gRPC endpoint (which is usually exposed on port 9090):

tip

In order for access to the ability to get/submit state-related information, such as the ability to submit PayForBlob transactions, or query for the node's account balance, a gRPC endpoint of a validator (core) node must be passed as directed below.

Please refer to the ports section for information on which ports are required to be open on your machine.

celestia full start --core.ip <ip-address>:<port>

If you would like to find example RPC endpoints, check out the list of resources here.

You can create your key for your node by following the cel-key instructions here

Once you start the Full Node, a wallet key will be generated for you. You will need to fund that address with testnet tokens to pay for PayForBlob transactions. You can find the address by running the following command:

./cel-key list --node.type full --keyring-backend test --p2p.network <network>

You can get testnet tokens from:

NOTE: If you are running a full-storage node for your sovereign rollup, it is highly recommended to request Arabica devnet tokens as Arabica has the latest changes that can be used to test for developing your sovereign rollup. You can still use Mocha Testnet as well, it is just mostly used for validator operations.

Optional: run the full storage node with a custom key​

In order to run a full storage node using a custom key:

  1. The custom key must exist inside the celestia full storage node directory at the correct path (default: ~/.celestia-full/keys/keyring-test)
  2. The name of the custom key must be passed upon start, like so:
celestia full start --core.ip <ip-address> --keyring.accname <name-of-custom-key>

Optional: start the full storage node with SystemD​

Follow the tutorial on setting up the full storage node as a background process with SystemD here.

With that, you are now running a Celestia full storage node.

Stop the full node​

In order to gracefully stop the full node, use Control + C in the terminal window where the node is running. Be sure to only do this once as the shutdown will not be instantaneous.