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Run a Sui Fullnode

We welcome you to run your own Sui fullnode! Sui fullnodes run a service that stores the full blockchain state and history. They service reads, either for end clients or by helping other fullnodes get up-to-date with the latest transactions that have been committed to the chain.

This role enables validators (or miners in other networks) to focus on servicing the write path and processing transactions as fast as possible. Once a validator has committed a new set of transactions (or a block of transactions), the validator will push that block to a fullnode (potentially a number of fullnodes) who will then in turn disseminate it to the rest of the network.

Important: For potential validators, running a Sui fullnode is an absolute prerequisite. We encourage auditors, bridges, state mirrors and other interested parties to join us. At this time, we offer no guarantees on performance or stability of our fullnode software. We expect things to evolve and stabilize over time, and we're seeking feedback in the form of Sui Code Bug issues filed in GitHub for any problems encountered.

Features

Sui fullnodes exist to:

  • Track and verify the state of the blockchain, independently and locally.
  • Serve read requests from clients.
  • Conduct local app testing against verified data.

State synchronization

Today Sui fullnodes sync with validators to be able to learn about newly committed transactions.

The normal life of a transaction requires a few round trips to 2f+1 validators to be able to form a TxCert, at which point a transaction is guaranteed to be committed and executed.

Today, this synchronization process is performed by:

  1. Following 2f+1 validators and listening for newly committed transactions.
  2. Requesting the transaction from one validator.
  3. Locally executing the transaction and updating the local DB.

This synchronization process is far from ideal as it requires listening to at a minimum 2f+1 validators to ensure that a fullnode has properly seen all new transactions. Over time, we will improve this process (e.g. with the introduction of checkpoints, ability to synchronize with other fullnodes, etc.) in order to have better guarantees around a fullnode’s ability to be confident it has seen all recent transactions.

Architecture

The Sui fullnode is essentially a read-only view of the network state. Unlike validator nodes, fullnodes cannot sign transactions, although they can validate the integrity of the chain by re-executing transactions that were previously committed by a quorum of validators.

Today, a fullnode is expected to maintain the full history of the chain; in the future, sufficiently old history may need to be pruned and offloaded to cheaper storage.

Conversely, a validator needs to store only the latest transactions on the frontier of the object graph (e.g., txes with >0 unspent output objects).

Fullnode setup

Follow the instructions here to run your own Sui fullnode.

Hardware requirements

We recommend the following minimum hardware requirements for running a fullnode:

  • CPUs: 2
  • RAM: 8GB
  • Storage: 50GB

Storage requirements will vary based on various factors (age of the chain, transaction rate, etc) although we don't anticipate running a fullnode on devnet will require more than 50 GBs today given it is reset upon each release roughly every two weeks.

Software requirements

We recommend running Sui fullnodes on Linux. The Sui team supports the Ubuntu and Debian distributions and tests against Ubuntu version 18.04 (Bionic Beaver).

That said, you are welcome to run a Sui fullnode on the operating system of your choosing and submit changes to accommodate that environment.

Before building, ensure the required tools are installed in your environment as outlined in the Prerequisites section. Note, you will fork the Sui repository here rather than clone it as described in Prerequisites. So you can skip that step.

If you are using Linux, install these extra dependencies. For example, in Ubuntu, run:

    $ apt-get update \
    && DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive TZ=Etc/UTC apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
    tzdata \
    git \
    ca-certificates \
    curl \
    build-essential \
    libssl-dev \
    pkg-config \
    libclang-dev \
    cmake

Configuring your fullnode

Currently, the only supported way of running a fullnode requires building from source. In the future, we will provide Docker images for more flexibility in how a fullnode is run.

Building from source

  1. Set up your fork of the Sui repository:
    1. Go to the Sui repository on GitHub and click the Fork button in the top right-hand corner of the screen.
    2. Clone your personal fork of the Sui repository to your local machine (ensure that you insert your GitHub username into the URL): 
      $ git clone https://github.com/<YOUR-GITHUB-USERNAME>/sui.git
  2. cd into your sui repository: 
    $ cd sui
  3. Set up the Sui repository as a git remote: 
    $ git remote add upstream https://github.com/MystenLabs/sui
  4. Sync your fork: 
    $ git fetch upstream
  5. Check out the devnet branch: 
    $ git checkout --track upstream/devnet
  6. Make a copy of the fullnode configuration template: 
    $ cp crates/sui-config/data/fullnode-template.yaml fullnode.yaml
  7. Download the latest genesis state for devnet by clicking that link or by running the following in your terminal: 
    $ curl -fLJO https://github.com/MystenLabs/sui-genesis/raw/main/devnet/genesis.blob
  8. Optional: You can skip this set of steps if you are willing to accept the default paths to resources. If you need custom paths, edit your fullnode.yaml file to reflect the paths you employ:
    1. Update the db-path field with the path to where the fullnode's database will be located. By default this will create the database in a directory ./suidb relative to your current directory: 
      db-path: "/path/to/suidb"
    2. Update the genesis-file-location with the path to the genesis file. By default, the config looks for the file genesis.blob in your current directory: 
      genesis:
genesis-file-location: "/path/to/genesis.blob"
  9. Start your Sui fullnode: 
    $ cargo run --release --bin sui-node -- --config-path fullnode.yaml
  10. Post build, receive the success confirmation message, SuiNode started!

Your fullnode will now be serving the read endpoints of the Sui JSON-RPC API at: http://127.0.0.1:9000

Using the Explorer with your fullnode

The Sui Explorer lets you configure where it should issue read requests to query the blockchain. This enables you to point the Explorer at your locally running fullnode and see the transactions it has synced from the network. To make this change:

  1. Open a browser and go to: https://explorer.devnet.sui.io/
  2. Click the Devnet button in the top right-hand corner of the Explorer and select the Local network from the drop-down menu.
  3. Close the Choose a Network menu to see the latest transactions.

The Explorer will now use your local fullnode to explore the state of the chain.

Monitoring

Monitor your fullnode using the instructions at Logging, Tracing, Metrics, and Observability.

Updating your fullnode with new releases

Whenever a new release is deployed to devnet, the blockchain state is typically wiped clean. In order to have your fullnode continue to properly synchronize with the new state of devnet, you'll need to follow a few steps based on how you originally set up your node. See below.

Built from source

If you followed the instructions for building from Source, update your fullnode as follows:

  1. Shut down your currently running fullnode.
  2. cd into your local Sui repository: 
    $ cd sui
  3. Remove the old on-disk database and 'genesis.blob' file: 
    $ rm -r suidb genesis.blob
  4. Fetch the source from the latest release: 
    $ git fetch upstream
  5. Reset your branch: 
    $ git checkout -B devnet --track upstream/devnet
  6. Download the latest genesis state for devnet as described above.
  7. Update your fullnode.yaml configuration file if needed.
  8. Restart your Sui fullnode: 
    $ cargo run --release --bin sui-node -- --config-path fullnode.yaml

Your fullnode will once again be running at: http://127.0.0.1:9000

Future plans

Today, a fullnode relies only on synchronizing with 2f+1 validators in order to ensure it has seen all committed transactions. In the future, we expect fullnodes to fully participate in a peer-to-peer (p2p) environment where the load of disseminating new transactions can be shared with the whole network and not place the burden solely on the validators. We also expect future features, such as checkpoints, to enable improved performance of synchronizing the state of the chain from genesis.

Please see our privacy policy to learn how we handle information about our nodes.