New post about Erigon after the Merge:
Ethereum Foundation recently announced that “It is strongly advised to stay up-to-date on the latest available versions of clients being used. This can be done by continue monitoring client repositories, client mailing lists and client social media channels for updates.”
It is thus recommended to use
Erigon v2022.09.01-alpha as of
now. If you have previously been on Erigon beta you will have to re-sync the DB from scratch,
otherwise it should be compatible.
Further, for an updated version of how to config Erigon as a service see this blog post:
Hardware recommendations are 2Tb storage space on a single partition (1.6Tb state and 200GB temp files) and 16GB RAM. The more RAM you have the faster Erigon is able to sync. With 16GB of RAM the sync takes around 6 days, with 32GB 5 days and with 64GB approximately 4 days.
./build/bin/erigon --help
The Erigon database is a key-value store organised in tables (also commonly referred to as “buckets”). This is the list of the main tables in the database,
| Table | Description |
|---|---|
| Headers | This table stores information about block headers |
| Block Bodies | Transactions and Ommers |
| Header Numbers | Mapping of 32-byte header/block hashes to the corresponding block numbers |
| Receipts | Records the list of transaction receipts for each block |
| PlainState | Store together Accounts and Storage |
| History Of Accounts | The history of accounts records how the accounts changed at each block |
| Change Sets | Records the history of changes in accounts and contract storage |
| HashedState | Used to calculate Merkle Trie root hash of whole current state |
| IntermediateTrieHashes | Used to calculate Merkle Trie root hash of whole current state |
| Tx Senders | List of transaction sender addresses for each transaction |
This document explains the main tables in more detail and how Erigon organize the database and how it is different from Geth. There is also a DB FAQ.
Clone git repo,
git clone --recurse-submodules -j8 https://github.com/ledgerwatch/erigon.git
The default path that Erigon saves the chain data is ~/.local/share/erigon and you can change
this with the --datadir option.
cd erigon
make erigon
./build/bin/erigon --datadir mainnet
Note the –datadir option that allows you to store Erigon files in a non-default location, in this example, in mainnet subdirectory of the current directory. Name of the directory –datadir does not have to match the name of the chain in –chain.
Erigon syncs mainnet by default and is an archive node by default. Erigon has a pruning option if you do not want to sync the whole history.
When the syncing is starting the following info will show,
INFO[12-27|19:11:50.532] Build info git_branch=...
INFO[12-27|19:11:50.533] Starting Erigon on Ethereum mainnet...
INFO[12-27|19:11:50.536] Maximum peer count ETH=100 total=100
INFO[12-27|19:11:50.536] Set global gas cap cap=50000000
INFO[12-27|19:11:50.599] Opening Database label=chaindata
path=/media/node/erigon/erigon/mainnet/chaindata
After this the staged sync
starts. The log of the ./build/bin/erigon --datadir mainnet command will be displayed in the
console. The logs can be saved by piping them to a file, e.g.,
./build/bin/erigon --datadir mainnet 2>&1 | tee erigon.log
Once the sync is up to date the node continues to update the database with the newest block.
With htop you can monitor processes in real time.
It is possible to shut down Erigon and then start syncing again by starting Erigon and pointing to the database file. There is also a testing document with instructions on how to proceed when Erigon is updated.
Both ./build/bin/erigon and ./build/bin/rpcdaemon can be run as services, e.g., Systemd or
supervisor. This can help
to connect the node to other applications. Setting up the rpcdaemon as a service we’ll create a
file called /etc/systemd/system/erigon-rpc.service,
[Unit]
Description=Erigon RPC Daemon
[Service]
WorkingDirectory=/media/node/erigon/erigon/
ExecStart=/media/node/erigon/erigon/build/bin/rpcdaemon --datadir=mainnet
+++--private.api.addr=localhost:9090 --http.api=eth,erigon,web3,net,
+++debug,trace,txpool --ws
User=magnus
Restart=always
RestartSec=5s
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Now you can start the service with sudo systemctl start erigon-rpc and check if the service is
working properly with systemctl status erigon-rpc.
Once the service is running you can send a curl command to see if things are working. rpcdaemon
is by default using https://localhost:8045,
curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" --data '{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method":
"eth_blockNumber", "params": [], "id":1}' localhost:8545
should return something like,
{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"result":"0xd51b03"}
There are several ways of accessing data stored in Ethereum nodes,
You can also access the node data by Ethers, using the local node as a provider. Here is the code I tried for that,
// Comment in console
console.log("Starting!");
// Import libraries
import { ethers } from "ethers";
// Set provider (Ethereum node)
const provider = new ethers.providers.WebSocketProvider('ws://127.0.0.1:8545');
// Set transaction
const tx_hash = '0x5e1657ef0e9be9bc72efefe59a2528d0d730d478cfc9e6cdd09af9f997bb3ef4';
// Define function to retrive tx
async function localTx() {
const tx = await provider.getTransaction(tx_hash)
const receipt = await provider.getTransactionReceipt(tx_hash)
console.log(tx)
console.log(receipt)
console.log('Complete!')
};
// Export main function
export const run = () => {
localTx().catch(err => console.error(err));
};
This will only work if you use the --ws flag when starting the rpcdaemon service.
Otterscan is an Ethereum block explorer designed to be run locally with Erigon. Otterscan is a patched version of Erigon that you add as an additional remote to your existing git repo.
git remote add otterscan https://github.com/wmitsuda/erigon.git
Check which tag your repo has with,
git tag
For example, if you are running Erigon from v2021.07.01 tag, checkout the tag v2021.07.01-otterscan and rebuild rpcdaemon,
git fetch --all
git fetch otterscan --tags
git checkout <version-tag-otterscan>
make rpcdaemon