The above resources hold valuable information and links to further resources, and is recommended reading.
Sep 15 08:42:44 e erigon[31611]: [INFO] [09-15|08:42:44.174] Commit cycle in=818.880865ms
Sep 15 08:42:44 e erigon[31611]: [INFO] [09-15|08:42:44.174] RPC Daemon notified of new headers from=15537391 to
Sep 15 08:42:44 e erigon[31611]: [INFO] [09-15|08:42:44.174] [1/15 Headers] Waiting for headers... from=15537392
Sep 15 08:42:50 e erigon[31611]: [INFO] [09-15|08:42:50.880]
Sep 15 08:42:50 e erigon[31611]: ,,, ,,, ,,, ,,,
Sep 15 08:42:50 e erigon[31611]: ;" ^; ;' ", ;" ^; ;' ",
Sep 15 08:42:50 e erigon[31611]: ; s$$$$$$$s ; ; s$$$$$$$s ;
Sep 15 08:42:50 e erigon[31611]: , ss$$$$$$$$$$s ,' ooooooooo. .oooooo. .oooooo..o , ss$$$$$$$$$$s ,'
Sep 15 08:42:50 e erigon[31611]: ;s$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ '888 'Y88. d8P' 'Y8b d8P' 'Y8 ;s$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Sep 15 08:42:50 e erigon[31611]: $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ 888 .d88'888 888Y88bo. $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Sep 15 08:42:50 e erigon[31611]: $$$$P""Y$$$Y""W$$$$$ 888ooo88P' 888 888 '"Y8888o. $$$$P""Y$$$Y""W$$$$$
Sep 15 08:42:50 e erigon[31611]: $$$$ p"$$$"q $$$$$ 888 888 888 '"Y88b $$$$ p"$$$"q $$$$$
Sep 15 08:42:50 e erigon[31611]: $$$$ .$$$$$. $$$$ 888 '88b d88'oo .d8P $$$$ .$$$$$. $$$$
Sep 15 08:42:50 e erigon[31611]: $$DcaU$$$$$$$$$$ o888o 'Y8bood8P' 8""88888P' $$DcaU$$$$$$$$$$
Sep 15 08:42:50 e erigon[31611]: "Y$$$"*"$$$Y" "Y$$$"*"$$$Y"
Sep 15 08:42:50 e erigon[31611]: "$b.$$" "$b.$$"
Sep 15 08:42:50 e erigon[31611]: .o. . o8o . .o8
Sep 15 08:42:50 e erigon[31611]: .888. .o8 '"' .o8 "888
Sep 15 08:42:50 e erigon[31611]: .8"888. .ooooo. .o888oooooo oooo ooo .oooo. .o888oo .ooooo. .oooo888
Sep 15 08:42:50 e erigon[31611]: .8' '888. d88' '"Y8 888 '888 '88. .8' 'P )88b 888 d88' '88bd88' '888
Sep 15 08:42:50 e erigon[31611]: .88ooo8888. 888 888 888 '88..8' .oP"888 888 888ooo888888 888
Sep 15 08:42:50 e erigon[31611]: .8' '888. 888 .o8 888 . 888 '888' d8( 888 888 .888 .o888 888
Sep 15 08:42:50 e erigon[31611]: o88o o8888o'Y8bod8P' "888"o888o '8' 'Y888""8o "888"'Y8bod8P''Y8bod88P"
Sep 15 08:42:50 e erigon[31611]:
Sep 15 08:42:50 e erigon[31611]: [INFO] [09-15|08:42:50.882] [1/15 Headers] Processed highest inserted
Sep 15 08:42:50 e erigon[31611]: [INFO] [09-15|08:42:50.933] [6/15 Execution] Completed on block=15537393
This morning Ethereum merged with the Beacon Chain and is now running with PoS. With this, there is one important change if you run an archive node,
Previously, on PoW, it was sufficient to run an EL client to run an archive or full node. However, after the Merge an Ethereum full node is a combination of a CL client and an EL client, these communicate with each other through a new Engine JSON-RPC API, and authenticate each other using a JWT secret. The clients should run on the same machine for stability.
From Ethereum Foundation: “In other words, if you were already running a node on the Beacon Chain, you now also need to run an execution layer client. Similarly, if you were running a node on the current proof-of-work network, you will need to run a consensus layer client.”
As of now, there are 5 CL clients that support the Merge: Lighthouse, Lodestar, Nimbus, Prysm, and
Teku. In this post I will run a Lighthouse v3.1.0 consensus client.
First, you have to install the Rust programming language,
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
In the Rust development environment, all tools are installed to the ~/.cargo/bin directory, and we need to update the search path,
source $HOME/.cargo/env
First, we need to install the following packages,
sudo apt install -y git gcc g++ make cmake pkg-config llvm-dev libclang-dev clang
Then we can build Lighthouse from source by,
git clone https://github.com/sigp/lighthouse.git
cd lighthouse
git checkout stable
make
and we can check that we have the correct version with lighthouse --version,
Lighthouse v3.1.0-aa022f4
In the future if we want to update Lighthouse we can run,
cd lighthouse
git fetch
git checkout ${VERSION}
make
The Lighthouse node must be connected to an execution client for the execution client (Erigon)
to process transactions beyond block 15537393. The authentication that is used to connect the
clients is JWT. The EL client must expose the JWT to a port
that is not used before, the default port used here is 8551.
From Erigon’s Github: “Once Erigon is running, you need to point your CL client to
In order for Lighthouse to work with Erigon it needs to be synced. This will take a day or so, and
if you set up Lighthouse for the first time you can use a checkpoint to sync from. You will add
the flag --checkpoint-sync-url <URL> to your Lighthouse command, where <URL> is an endpoint.
You can find endpoints at this website.
An example is --checkpoint-sync-url https://beaconstate.ethstaker.cc.
If you get the following in the logs INFO Starting checkpoint sync, remote_url:
https://beaconstate.ethstaker.cc/, service:... it means that the sync started from the checkpoint.
However, if you get, e.g, INFO Refusing to checkpoint sync, msg: database already exists, use
--purge-db to force checkpoint sync, the checkpoint sync did not work, and as the message says you
can add the flag --purge-db such that you do not have to sync from scratch.
From Lighhouse: Once forwards sync completes, Lighthouse will commence a “backfill sync” to download the blocks from the checkpoint back to genesis. The beacon node will log messages similar to the following each minute while it completes backfill sync,
INFO Downloading historical blocks est_time: 5 hrs 0 mins, speed: 111.96 slots/sec, distance:
2020451 slots (40 weeks 0 days), service: slot_notifier
For building the latest alpha release (this will be suitable for most users just wanting to run a node),
git clone https://github.com/ledgerwatch/erigon.git
cd erigon
git checkout alpha
make erigon
./build/bin/erigon
If you have previously run the beta version of Erigon (you can find releases
here) then you will have to re-sync the DB, and
this will take a few days depending on your system.
Most Linux distributions run systemd as init system, and it handles services on the machine. We
can set up Erigon and Lighthouse as services such that they run in the background. If you are
unfamiliar with Systemd Services you can check out my
blog post about it.
We will create two files called erigon.service and lighthouse.service in /etc/systemd/system,
cd /etc/systemd/system
sudo touch erigon.service
sudo touch lighthouse.service
We will then edit (sudo vim erigon.service and sudo vim lighthouse.service) the files in the
following ways,
[Unit]
Description=Erigon Node
After=network.target network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target
[Service]
WorkingDirectory=/media/node/erigon/erigon/
ExecStart=/media/node/erigon/erigon/build/bin/erigon \
--datadir=mainnet \
--private.api.addr=localhost:9090 \
--authrpc.jwtsecret=/media/node/erigon/erigon/mainnet/jwt.hex \
--http \
--ws \
--http.api=engine,eth,erigon,web3,net,debug,trace,txpool,shh
User=magnus
Restart=always
RestartSec=5s
# Output to syslog
StandardOutput=syslog
StandardError=syslog
#Change this to find app logs in /var/log/syslog
SyslogIdentifier=erigon
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Note that the newer version of Erigon has the http server activated by default. If you previously
ran on Erigon beta, you can now put some flags from the RPC daemon into Erigon, and the stand alone
RPC daemon is no longer necessary to curl the node.
[Unit]
Description=Lighthouse CL Client
After=network.target network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target
[Service]
ExecStart=/home/magnus/.cargo/bin/lighthouse beacon_node \
--datadir /media/node/erigon/erigon/mainnet \
--network mainnet \
--http \
--execution-endpoint http://localhost:8551 \
--execution-jwt /media/node/erigon/erigon/mainnet/jwt.hex \
--checkpoint-sync-url https://beaconstate.ethstaker.cc \
User=magnus
Restart=always
RestartSec=5s
# Output to syslog
StandardOutput=syslog
StandardError=syslog
#Change this to find app logs in /var/log/syslog
SyslogIdentifier=lighthouse
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Note that I randomly set the same --datadir option for both Erigon and Lighthouse which might
not be advisable.
Now we can start Lighthouse and Erigon with,
sudo systemctl start erigon
sudo systemctl start lighthouse
We can monitor the logs continuously with,
sudo journalctl -u erigon -f
and,
sudo journalctl -u lighthouse -f
If you want to monitor your complete syslog you can run,
sudo tail -f /var/log/syslog
To check if the archive node is fully synced we can query the latest block, convert it from hex to int, and compare it to the latest validated block at Etherscan,
curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" --data '{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method":
"eth_blockNumber", "params": [], "id":1}' localhost:8545 | jq -r ".result" | mawk '{ printf "%d\n",
$1 }'
Here we can see that my node’s latest block is 15544659 and Etherscan shows 15544659, and we
are thus up to date.