An automated governance helper for BLOCX Sentinel is an autonomous agent for persisting, processing and automating BLOCX governance objects and tasks. It is a Python application which runs alongside the BLOCX instance on each BLOCX Masternode.
These instructions cover installing Sentinel on Ubuntu 18.04 / 20.04.
Update system package list and install dependencies:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get -y install git python3 virtualenv
Make sure Python version 3.6.x or above is installed:
python3 --version
Make sure the local BlocX daemon running is at least version 0.15.0.
$ blocxd --version | head -n1
Clone the Sentinel repo and install Python dependencies.
$ git clone https://github.com/BLOCXTECH/sentinel.git && cd sentinel
$ virtualenv -p $(which python3) ./venv
$ ./venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
Sentinel is "used" as a script called from cron every minute.
Set up a crontab entry to call Sentinel every minute:
$ crontab -e
In the crontab editor, add the lines below, replacing '/path/to/sentinel' to the path where you cloned sentinel to:
* * * * * cd /path/to/sentinel && RPCUSER=blocx RPCPASSWORD=password RPCHOST=127.0.0.1 RPCPORT=12971 ./venv/bin/python bin/sentinel.py >/dev/null 2>&1
Configuration is done via environment variables. Example:
$ RPCUSER=blocx RPCPASSWORD=password RPCHOST=127.0.0.1 RPCPORT=12971 ./venv/bin/python bin/sentinel.pyA path to a blocx.conf file can be specified in sentinel.conf:
# warning: deprecated
blocx_conf=/path/to/blocx.conf
This is now deprecated and will be removed in a future version. Users are encouraged to update their configurations to use environment variables instead.
To view debug output, set the SENTINEL_DEBUG environment variable to anything non-zero, then run the script manually:
$ SENTINEL_DEBUG=1 ./venv/bin/python bin/sentinel.py