Lines that lack hash or dollar signs are pastes from config files. They
should be copied verbatim or adapted, without the indentation tab.
+apt-get install commands are suggestions for required dependencies.
+They conform to an Ubuntu 13.10 system but may well work with Debian
+or earlier and later versions of Ubuntu.
+
Prerequisites
-------------
perform the operation described here, you are expected to fix the
issue so you can continue following this howto.
-**Software.** A recent Linux distribution with the following software
+**Software.** A recent Linux 64-bit distribution with the following software
installed: `python`, `easy_install`, `git`, standard C/C++
build chain. You will need root access in order to install other software or
Python libraries.
**Hardware.** The lightest setup is a pruning server with diskspace
-requirements well under 1 GB growing very moderately and less taxing
-on I/O and CPU once it's up and running. However note that you also need
-to run bitcoind and keep a copy of the full blockchain, which is roughly
-9 GB in April 2013. If you have less than 2 GB of RAM make sure you limit
-bitcoind to 8 concurrent connections. If you have more ressources to
-spare you can run the server with a higher limit of historic transactions
-per address. CPU speed is also important, mostly for the initial block
+requirements of about 10 GB for the electrum database. However note that
+you also need to run bitcoind and keep a copy of the full blockchain,
+which is roughly 20 GB in April 2014. If you have less than 2 GB of RAM
+make sure you limit bitcoind to 8 concurrent connections. If you have more
+ressources to spare you can run the server with a higher limit of historic
+transactions per address. CPU speed is important, mostly for the initial block
chain import, but also if you plan to run a public Electrum server, which
could serve tens of concurrent requests. Any multi-core x86 CPU ~2009 or
-newer other than Atom should do for good performance.
+newer other than Atom should do for good performance. An ideal setup
+has enough RAM to hold and procss the leveldb database in tmpfs (e.g. /dev/shm).
Instructions
------------
(others might want to use `/usr/local/bin` instead). We will download source
code files to the `~/src` directory.
- # sudo adduser bitcoin
+ $ sudo adduser bitcoin --disabled-password
+ $ sudo apt-get install git
# su - bitcoin
$ mkdir ~/bin ~/src
$ echo $PATH
We will download the latest git snapshot for Electrum and 'install' it in
our ~/bin directory:
- $ mkdir -p ~/src/electrum
- $ cd ~/src/electrum
- $ git clone https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum-server.git server
- $ chmod +x ~/src/electrum/server/server.py
- $ ln -s ~/src/electrum/server/server.py ~/bin/electrum
+ $ mkdir -p ~/electrum-server
+ $ git clone https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum-server.git
+
+### Step 3. Download bitcoind
-### Step 3. Download Bitcoind stable from git & patch it
+Older versions of Electrum used to require a patched version of bitcoind.
+This is not the case anymore since bitcoind supports the 'txindex' option.
+We currently recommend bitcoind 0.9.1 stable.
-In order for the latest versions of Electrum to work properly we will need to use
-bitcoind 0.8.1 stable or higher. It can be downloaded from github and
-it needs to be patched with an electrum specific patch.
+If your package manager does not supply a recent bitcoind and prefer to compile
+here are some pointers for Ubuntu:
- $ cd src && wget https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/archive/v0.8.1.tar.gz
- $ tar xfz v0.8.1.tar.gz
- $ cd bitcoin-0.8.1
- $ patch -p1 < ~/src/electrum/server/patch/patch
- $ cd src && make USE_UPNP= -f makefile.unix
+ # apt-get install make g++ python-leveldb libboost-all-dev libssl-dev libdb++-dev pkg-config
+ # su - bitcoin
+ $ cd ~/src && wget https://bitcoin.org/bin/0.9.1/bitcoin-0.9.1-linux.tar.gz
+ $ sha256sum bitcoin-0.9.1-linux.tar.gz | grep 3fabc1c629007b465a278525883663d41a2ba62699f2773536a8bf59ca210425
+ $ tar xfz bitcoin-0.9.1-linux.tar.gz
+ $ cd bitcoin-0.9.1-linux/src
+ $ tar xfz bitcoin-0.9.1.tar.gz
+ $ cd bitcoin-0.9.1
+ $ ./configure --disable-wallet --without-miniupnpc
+ $ make
+ $ strip ~/src/bitcoin-0.9.1-linux/src/bitcoin-0.9.1/src/bitcoind
+ $ cp -a ~/src/bitcoin-0.9.1-linux/src/bitcoin-0.9.1/src/bitcoind ~/bin/bitcoind
### Step 4. Configure and start bitcoind
rpcuser=<rpc-username>
rpcpassword=<rpc-password>
daemon=1
+ txindex=1
+
-Restart `bitcoind`:
+If you have an existing installation of bitcoind and have not previously
+set txindex=1 you need to reindex the blockchain by running
+
+ $ bitcoind -reindex
+
+If you have a fresh copy of bitcoind start `bitcoind`:
$ bitcoind
$ bitcoind getinfo
+Before starting electrum server your bitcoind should have processed all
+blockes and caught up to the current height of the network.
You should also set up your system to automatically start bitcoind at boot
time, running as the 'bitcoin' user. Check your system documentation to
find out the best way to do this.
package manager. Electrum also depends on two Python libraries which we will
need to install "by hand": `JSONRPClib`.
+ $ sudo apt-get install python-setuptools python-openssl
$ sudo easy_install jsonrpclib
- $ sudo apt-get install python-openssl
-### Step 6. Install leveldb
+### Step 6. Install leveldb and plyvel
- $ sudo apt-get install python-leveldb
+ $ sudo apt-get install python-leveldb libleveldb-dev
+ $ sudo easy_install plyvel
See the steps in README.leveldb for further details, especially if your system
-doesn't have the python-leveldb package.
+doesn't have the python-leveldb package or if plyvel installation fails.
+
+leveldb should be at least version 1.1.9. Earlier version are believed to be buggy.
### Step 7. Select your limit
Electrum server uses leveldb to store transactions. You can choose
how many spent transactions per address you want to store on the server.
The default is 100, but there are also servers with 1000 or even 10000.
-Very few addresses have more than 10000 transactions. A limit this high
+Few addresses have more than 10000 transactions. A limit this high
can be considered to be equivalent to a "full" server. Full servers previously
used abe to store the blockchain. The use of abe for electrum servers is now
deprecated.
faster database by pruning spent transactions. It's a lot quicker to get up
and running and requires less maintenance and diskspace than abe.
-The section in the configuration file looks like this:
+The section in the electrum server configuration file (see step 10) looks like this:
[leveldb]
- path = /path/to/your/database
+ path_fulltree = /path/to/your/database
# for each address, history will be pruned if it is longer than this limit
pruning_limit = 100
### Step 8. Import blockchain into the database or download it
-As of April 2013 it takes between 6-24 hours to import 230k of blocks, depending
+It's recommended to fetch a pre-processed leveldb from the net
+
+You can fetch recent copies of electrum leveldb databases and further instructions
+from the Electrum full archival server foundry at:
+http://foundry.electrum.org/
+
+Alternatively if you have the time and nerve you can import the blockchain yourself.
+
+As of April 2014 it takes between two days and over a week to import 300k of blocks, depending
on CPU speed, I/O speed and selected pruning limit.
-It's considerably faster to index in memory. You can use /dev/shm or indexing in RAM
+It's considerably faster and strongly recommended to index in memory. You can use /dev/shm or
or create a tmpfs which will also use swap if you run out of memory:
- $ sudo mount -t tmpfs -o rw,nodev,nosuid,noatime,size=6000M,mode=0777 none /tmpfs
+ $ sudo mount -t tmpfs -o rw,nodev,nosuid,noatime,size=15000M,mode=0777 none /tmpfs
-At limit 100 the database comes to 2,6 GB with 230k blocks and takes roughly 6h to import in /dev/shm.
-At limit 1000 the database comes to 3,0 GB with 230k blocks and takes roughly 10h to import in /dev/shm.
-At limit 10000 the database comes to 3,5 GB with 230k blocks and takes roughly 24h to import in /dev/shm.
+If you use tmpfs make sure you have enough RAM and swap to cover the size. If you only have 4 gigs of
+RAM but add 15 gigs of swap from a file that's fine too. tmpfs is rather smart to swap out the least
+used parts. It's fine to use a file on a SSD for swap in thise case.
-Alternatively you can fetch a pre-processed leveldb from the net
+It's not recommended to do initial indexing of the database on a SSD because the indexing process
+does at least 20 TB (!) of disk writes and puts considerable wear-and-tear on a SSD. It's a lot better
+to use tmpfs and just swap out to disk when necessary.
+
+Databases have grown to roughly 8 GB in April 2014, give or take a gigabyte between pruning limits
+100 and 10000. Leveldb prunes the database from time to time, so it's not uncommon to see databases
+~50% larger at times when it's writing a lot especially when indexing from the beginning.
-You can fetch recent copies of electrum leveldb databases and further instructions
-from the Electrum full archival server foundry at:
-http://electrum-foundry.no-ip.org/
-### Step 9. Configure Electrum server
+### Step 9. Create a self-signed SSL cert
+
+To run SSL / HTTPS you need to generate a self-signed certificate
+using openssl. You could just comment out the SSL / HTTPS ports in the config and run
+without, but this is not recommended.
+
+Use the sample code below to create a self-signed cert with a recommended validity
+of 5 years. You may supply any information for your sign request to identify your server.
+They are not currently checked by the client except for the validity date.
+When asked for a challenge password just leave it empty and press enter.
+
+ $ openssl genrsa -des3 -passout pass:x -out server.pass.key 2048
+ $ openssl rsa -passin pass:x -in server.pass.key -out server.key
+ writing RSA key
+ $ rm server.pass.key
+ $ openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr
+ ...
+ Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:US
+ State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:California
+ Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []: electrum-server.tld
+ ...
+ A challenge password []:
+ ...
+
+ $ openssl x509 -req -days 730 -in server.csr -signkey server.key -out server.crt
+
+The server.crt file is your certificate suitable for the ssl_certfile= parameter and
+server.key corresponds to ssl_keyfile= in your electrum server config
+
+Starting with Electrum 1.9 the client will learn and locally cache the SSL certificate
+for your server upon the first request to prevent man-in-the middle attacks for all
+further connections.
+
+If your certificate is lost or expires on the server side you currently need to run
+your server with a different server name along with a new certificate for this server.
+Therefore it's a good idea to make an offline backup copy of your certificate and key
+in case you need to restore it.
+
+### Step 10. Configure Electrum server
Electrum reads a config file (/etc/electrum.conf) when starting up. This
file includes the database setup, bitcoind RPC setup, and a few other
Go through the sample config options and set them to your liking.
If you intend to run the server publicly have a look at README-IRC.md
-If you're looking to run SSL / HTTPS you need to generate a self-signed certificate
-using openssl. Otherwise you can just comment out the SSL / HTTPS ports and run
-without.
+### Step 11. Tweak your system for running electrum
+
+Electrum server currently needs quite a few file handles to use leveldb. It also requires
+file handles for each connection made to the server. It's good practice to increase the
+open files limit to 16k. This is most easily achived by sticking the value in .bashrc of the
+root user who usually passes this value to all unprivileged user sessions too.
+
+ $ sudo sed -i '$a ulimit -n 16384' /root/.bashrc
+
+Also make sure the bitcoin user can actually increase the ulimit by allowing it accordingly in
+/etc/security/limits.conf
+
+While most bugs are fixed in this regard electrum server may leak some memory and it's good practice to
+to restart the server once in a while from cron (preferred) or to at least monitor
+it for crashes and then restart the server. Monthly restarts should be fine for most setups.
+
+Two more things for you to consider:
+
+1. To increase security you may want to close bitcoind for incoming connections and connect outbound only
+
+2. Consider restarting bitcoind (together with electrum-server) on a weekly basis to clear out unconfirmed
+ transactions from the local the memory pool which did not propagate over the network
-### Step 10. (Finally!) Run Electrum server
+### Step 12. (Finally!) Run Electrum server
The magic moment has come: you can now start your Electrum server:
- $ server
+ $ cd ~/electrum-server
+ $ ./start
-You should see this on the screen:
+You should see this in the log file:
starting Electrum server
- cache: yes
-If you want to stop Electrum server, open another shell and run:
+If you want to stop Electrum server, use the 'stop' script:
- $ electrum-server stop
+ $ cd ~/electrum-server
+ $ ./stop
-You should also take a look at the 'start' and 'stop' scripts in
-`~/src/electrum/server`. You can use them as a starting point to create a
-init script for your system.
-### Step 11. Test the Electrum server
+### Step 13. Test the Electrum server
We will assume you have a working Electrum client, a wallet and some
transactions history. You should start the client and click on the green
response time in the Server selection window. You should send/receive some
bitcoins to confirm that everything is working properly.
-### Step 12. Join us on IRC, subscribe to the server thread
+### Step 14. Join us on IRC, subscribe to the server thread
Say hi to the dev crew, other server operators and fans on
irc.freenode.net #electrum and we'll try to congratulate you
git://git.novaco.in / electrum-server.git / blobdiff