Quorum Distributed Setup

How to setup up a distributed Quorum blockchain network with Istanbul consensus from scratch. This tutorial has been forked into the official Quorum guide here.

Initialisation

1. Build Quorum as described in this getting set up section - note that Constellation or Tessera is not required for this walkthrough guide. Ensure that PATH contains geth and bootnode. The geth in your PATH needs to be the quorum version and should be at least version 1.8 for the following to work (according to this known issue).
2. Install istanbul-tools and place the istanbul binary into PATH.
3. Create a working directory for each of the X number of initial validator nodes. Assign one node to be the lead for network initialisation.
4. Change into the lead node's working directory and generate the setup files for X initial validator nodes by executing istanbul setup --num X --nodes --quorum --save --verbose only execute this instruction once, i.e. not X times. This command will generate several items of interest: static-nodes.json; genesis.json; and nodekeys for all the initial validator nodes which will sit in numbered directories from 0 to X-1.
5. Update static-nodes.json to include the intended IP and port numbers of all initial validator nodes. In static-nodes.json, you will see a different row for each node. For the rest of the installation guide, row Y refers to node Y and row 1 is assumed to correspond to the lead node. Additionally, if you are creating a permissioned network (where only whitelisted nodes can attach to each other), then you need to now copy static-nodes.json and rename the copied file permissioned-nodes.json.
6. In each node's working directory, create a data directory called data, and inside data create the geth directory.
7. Now we will generate initial accounts for any of the nodes by executing geth --datadir data account new in the required node's working directory. The resulting public account address printed in the terminal should be recorded.
8. To add accounts to the initial block, edit the genesis.json file in the lead node's working directory and update the alloc field with the account(s) that were generated at previous step.
9. Next we need to distribute the files created in part 4, which currently reside in the lead node's working directory, to all other nodes. To do so, place genesis.json in the working directory of all nodes, place static-nodes.json and permissioned-nodes.json in the data folder of each node and place Z/nodekey in node (Z-1)'s data/geth directory.
10. Initialize all nodes with geth --datadir data init genesis.json. The resulting hash given by executing this command has to match for every node, otherwise you will have make a mistake in the setup process.
11. Start all nodes and send into background with PRIVATE_CONFIG=ignore nohup geth --datadir data --permissioned --nodiscover --istanbul.blockperiod 5 --syncmode full --mine --minerthreads 1 --verbosity 5 --networkid 10 --rpc --rpcaddr 0.0.0.0 --rpcport YOUR_NODES_RPC_PORT_NUMBER --rpcapi admin,db,eth,debug,miner,net,shh,txpool,personal,web3,quorum,istanbul --emitcheckpoints --port YOUR_NODES_PORT_NUMBER 2>>node.log &, remember to replace YOUR_NODES_RPC_PORT_NUMBER and YOUR_NODES_PORT_NUMBER with your node's designated port numbers. YOUR_NODES_PORT_NUMBER must match the port number for this node decided on in part 5. Additionally, if you are not using a permissioned network, then remove the --permissioned tag.

Note that part 11 starts Quorum without privacy support, as evidenced in prefix PRIVATE_CONFIG=ignore.

Connectivity Checks

Following the previous setup, your initial validator nodes will now be operational and you may attach to any node by executing geth attach data/geth.ipc in the required node's working directory.

Once attached there are various actions you can perform to check the connectivity of the network. For example:

• admin.peers will detail what other nodes are connected to this one.
• eth.blockNumber will detail how many blocks are on the blockchain. Make sure that this number is increasing.