The Docker configuration provided here allows one to run a number of Ethereum nodes using Docker Compose. It should go without saying that this package is intended purely for testing and evaluating Ethereum and should not be used for production.
To get started, build the base image:
$ cd ethereum-base/
$ docker build -t substrate/ethereum-base .
This may take some time to complete; the base image installs Ethereum, initialises a new chain and generates the DAG (the main culprit!)
Once the base image has been built, an arbitrary number of nodes may be started using Docker Compose:
$ cd ethereum-node/
$ docker-compose up -d
$ docker-compose scale node=3
If you want to tail out the logs to see what's happening:
$ docker-compose logs -f
In short, I wanted to learn about Ethereum (how it works and how to use it). I haven't quite done that yet, but as part of my journey, I wanted a way to easily spin up an Ethereum network with a private chain. This package will allow anybody to easily run a set of nodes that automatically connect to one another.
Feedback, pull requests, suggestions, friendly conversation welcome.
Watching the logs should give you an indication of when the nodes are all connected. You can also attach a shell instance to any of the containers and access the geth interactive console. First, get a list of the containers. Select one of the Ethereum nodes and execute a bash instance on it:
$ docker ps
$ docker exec -it <container-id> bash
Now you can attach to the running geth instance and view the connected peers:
# geth --datadir /opt/eth/chain attach ipc:/opt/eth/chain/geth.ipc
> admin.peers
...
If you're running into any problems using these Docker images or the Compose config, please let me know. I'm using the following tools:
- docker (1.11.1)
- docker-compose (1.7.1)
- docker-machine (0.7.0)
The base image should pull the latest stable version of Ethereum, and should use the latest version of Ubuntu.
- The
docker-compose.ymlfile is not compatible with docker versions < 1.6