[Docker compose] How to run a hived node / seed node / witness node

There are multiple ways of running a hived node. In this post we use docker compose for an easier setup. By default everything will be contained in one directory for easier management.

Recently @gtg also published a good post. You might want to check that out. It is a good post specially for the exchanges:
Hive Node Setup for the Smart, the Dumb, and the Lazy.

Requirements

Ubuntu 22
Storage:
- 1TB: for running a proper node with all the blockchain data
- - recommended for seed nodes and witness nodes
- 50GB: for pruned node
- - This node won't keep any blockchain data
- - e.g. use case would be having trusted source of state data like balances
- - To run "pruned" node you must add block-log-split = 0 (or block-log-split = 1 for one million blocks in storage) in config.ini
RAM: 4-64GB
- You can get away with less ram by putting shared_memory on disk
- I would recommend at least 8GB of RAM - Feel free to experiment
- Otherwise you need at least 24GB of RAM dedicated for SHM (shared_memory)
- 32GB "should" be fine in this case - have not tested
- With more plugins your SHM might grow and you might need more RAM
- SHM on disk is totally fine (NVME/SSD)

Docker

Docker installation is simple:

curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh
sudo sh get-docker.sh

Optional security step:
You might want to run hived and docker under a non-root user which is recommended.

# Create a non-root user - I name it "myuser"
adduser myuser
# Allow the user to run docker
addgroup myuser docker
# Switch to the user
su - myuser

While on the security topic, you might want to disable the password login on your server and use ssh keys and also install fail2ban for additional security. You can do that after setting up hived with the help of internet.

Hived

git clone https://gitlab.com/mahdiyari/hived_docker
cd hived_docker
cp .env.example .env

Now edit .env file accordingly. You set the hived version and the hived arguments there.

nano .env

P2P sync

For a p2p sync set ARGUMENTS="" in the .env file (which is done by default).

# Start hived in the background
docker compose up -d

Replay

The p2p sync should be fast enough for most people and I would recommend just doing that but if you already have a block_log you can try replaying.

The newer hived (not released yet - v1.27.7) by default will use splitted block logs instead of the legacy single block_log file. So even if you put one block_log, it will split it first and you should pay attention to your storage space in this case as 1TB might not be enough. To keep using the single block_log, you have to edit the config.ini before replaying.
By default the config.ini will be in the following location:

nano datadir/config.ini

Add block-log-split = -1 to keep block_log a single file.

You need ARGUMENTS="--replay" in the .env file. Then:

docker compose up -d

I recommend the P2P sync if you already don't have a block_log as the download speed of the block_log will probably be too slow to justify it over the P2P sync.

Docker commands

Docker commands that might be useful:

# see last 100 lines of logs
docker compose logs -f --tail 100

# stop and remove the container
# DO NOT force shut down hived
docker compose down

Witness node

To run as a witness you need to do additional steps. Generate a pair of keys and put the private key in your config.ini and add the public key to your hive account.

The secure option for generating keys would be something offline like the cli_wallet or some other wallet. But you could also use something like https://hivetasks.com/key-generator to generate random keys then copy one of the corresponding private and public keys. The website is safe at the time of writing. For this example I picked the generated posting key. It doesn't matter. You just need a pair of matching keys:

datadir/config.ini

witness="username"
private-key=5Jfv7EK8VtnnTgwCpmwvkWsqhKVeNKmgtcYQFeWH3zzjA1Y5qaG

Then you can use https://hive.ausbit.dev/witness to register a new witness or update an already existing one. You would need to login first to the website then refresh.

Then we put the public pair of our signing key in there and broadcast the the transaction:

Scroll down and:

You can ask your technical questions in the official hive discord (which you can find on hive.io bottom of the page) or #witness or #dev channel on https://openhive.chat/

For future hived updates, you would just need to edit the hived version in the .env file and be good to go.

_{*The first image is taken from pixabay.com}