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Gateway Setup

In the following guide, we will cover all the necessary steps to set up an Arweave gateway.

Requirements​

  1. A Unix OS (Debian 11 preferable)

  2. Docker and Docker Compose LTS

Suggested Hardware​

There are several million transactions on the Arweave chain. In order to effectively serve content on the gateway you'll need a decent sized computer. The ideal specs for a Gateway should have the following:

  1. 16GB RAM (ideally 32GB RAM)

  2. ~4TB of SSD storage available

  3. Intel i5 / AMD FX or greater, +4 vCPUs should be more than enough, these are typically Intel Xeon CPUs.

Install Tools​

sudo apt update; \
sudo apt -y install tmux curl nano apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl gnupg2 software-properties-common

Add Docker’s official GPG key:​

Import Docker GPG key used for signing Docker packages.

curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/debian/gpg | sudo apt-key add -

Add the Docker repository to Debian 10​

Add Docker repository which contain the latest stable releases of Docker CE.

sudo add-apt-repository \
   "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/debian \
   $(lsb_release -cs) \
   stable"

Install Docker​

sudo apt update; \
sudo apt -y install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io

This installation will add docker group to the system without any users. Add your user account to the group to run docker commands as non-privileged user.

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
newgrp docker

Check docker and compose version​

$ docker version
Client: Docker Engine - Community
 Version:           19.03.2
 API version:       1.40
 Go version:        go1.12.8
 Git commit:        6a30dfc
 Built:             Thu Aug 29 05:29:29 2019
 OS/Arch:           linux/amd64
 Experimental:      false

Server: Docker Engine - Community
 Engine:
  Version:          19.03.2
  API version:      1.40 (minimum version 1.12)
  Go version:       go1.12.8
  Git commit:       6a30dfc
  Built:            Thu Aug 29 05:28:05 2019
  OS/Arch:          linux/amd64
  Experimental:     false
 containerd:
  Version:          1.2.6
  GitCommit:        894b81a4b802e4eb2a91d1ce216b8817763c29fb
 runc:
  Version:          1.0.0-rc8
  GitCommit:        425e105d5a03fabd737a126ad93d62a9eeede87f
 docker-init:
  Version:          0.18.0
  GitCommit:        fec3683

Log out and log back in so that your group membership is re-evaluated.

exit

Clone gateway repo​

git clone https://github.com/mediafoundation/vartex

Configure the gateway​

First, let's copy the .env 

cp .env.example .env

Optionally add your own Arweave Node (miner)​

nano .env
ARWEAVE_NODES=["https://arweave.net","http://gateway-4.arweave.net:1984","http://lon-6.eu-west-1.arweave.net:1984"]
PORT=3000
PARALLEL=32
POLLTIME_DELAY_SECONDS=5
DB_TIMEOUT=30
HTTP_TIMEOUT_SECONDS=15
CASSANDRA_CONTACT_POINTS=["localhost:9042"]
KEYSPACE=gateway
CASSANDRA_USERNAME=cassandra
CASSANDRA_PASSWORD=cassandra
CACHE_IMPORT_PATH="cache/imports"

Build and run Vartex​

docker-compose up --build
tip

Make sure you build your docker image every time the .env file is modified in order to apply the new settings.

While developing you can specify a range of blocks you wish to sync, the range starts from the most recent known block from the cached hash_list down X amount of blocks specified with DEVELOPMENT_SYNC_LENGTH.

# for cached block height 1,000,000 would only sync down to 999,900
DEVELOPMENT_SYNC_LENGTH=100

Endpoints​

You can test if the server and the GraphQL queries are working properly by navigating to.

http://localhost:3000/graphql

This webpage should look similar to.

https://arweave.net/graphql

Local Testing​

You can now access any content hosted on the Arweave network, for example the file we've just deployed mytextfile.txt using Arweave's txID:

curl http://localhost:3000/6KZ2ok0JV21mtzUdo5WT_ErcuoLk9-MZcPWLX5LPmK8
ARWEAVE TEST - VERSION 1

Stopping the gateway​

You can safely stop the gateway by running:

docker-compose down