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Requirements

Rust

Install using rustup.rs:

curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh; source $HOME/.cargo/env

If rust is already installed, you should update to the latest version by running rustup update.

Grin currently does not support a minimum version of Rust, so it's recommended to build using the latest version.

Dependencies

git ● tor ● clang ● ncurses and libs (ncurses, ncursesw5) ● zlib libs (zlib1g-dev or zlib-devel) ● pkg-config ● libssl-dev ● llvm ● linux-headers (needed on Alpine linux)

For Debian-based distributions (Ubuntu, Mint etc):

apt install build-essential git tor cmake git libgit2-dev clang libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev zlib1g-dev pkg-config libssl-dev llvm

For macOS:

xcode-select --install
brew install --with-toolchain llvm
brew install pkg-config
brew install openssl

Build

git clone https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin.git
cd grin
git checkout v4.0.2
cargo build --release

Grin can also be built in debug mode (using the --debug or the --verbose flags) but this will render fast sync prohibitively slow due to the large overhead of cryptographic operations.

Build errors ↴

Build error: Could not compile tokio-retry

You might want to remove any previous rust installations to avoid conflicts. Use rustup to reinstall rust and cargo as described.

NOTE: If you install rust or cargo with your package manager (most Linuxes anno 2017) you’ll get too old versions. On Debian, you might have to manually compile cmake or get it from non-detault repositories.

Build error: failed to select a version for ‘serde_json’

Run cargo update to fix this

Build error: can’t compile crate bitflags

Chech rustc –version and note that bitflags requires rust 1.21 or newer. Install via rustup and recommended you also remove any rust/cargo installed via your package manager.

Build error: can’t locate stdarg.h

If librocksdb-sys fails to build, try symlinking stddef.h and stdarg.h from the gcc5 include directory. So probably from /usr/lib to /usr/include

Build error: /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lz

On Ubuntu install the zlib development headers: apt install zlib1g-dev.

Build error: /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lncursesw

On Ubuntu install the ncurses development headers: apt install libncursesw5-dev.

What was built?

Let's review what a succesfull build gets you.

Binary

target/release/grin is your main grin binary, located inside the build directory.

To add it to your path, type:

export PATH=`pwd`/target/release:$PATH

You can then run grin from anywhere on your system.

Data Files

All data, configuration and log files created and used by grin are located by default in the hidden ~/.grin directory (under your user home directory).

You can modify configuration values by editing the grin-server.toml file, located in ~/.grin/main/grin-server.toml.

You can have grin create its data files in the current directory. To do this, run:

grin server config

This will generate a grin-server.toml file in the current directory. Running grin from a directory that contains grin-server.toml will use the values in that filem which will also be pre-configured to use the current directory for all of the node's data.

Configuration

Grin attempts to run with sensible defaults, and can be further configured via the grin-server.toml file, generated by grin on its first run. The file contains documentation on each available option.

While it is recommended that you perform all grin server configuration via grin-server.toml, it's also possible to supply command line switches to grin that override any settings in the file.

For help on grin commands and their switches, try:

grin help
grin server help
grin client help
Mining

Once your grin node is up and running, you can start mining by building and running grin-miner against your node.

For grin-miner to be able to communicate with your grin node, make sure that you have enable_stratum_server = true in your grin-server.toml configuration file and you have a wallet listener running (grin-wallet listen).

Docker

(Running grin in a container)

docker build -t grin -f etc/Dockerfile .

For floonet, use etc/Dockerfile.floonet instead

You can bind-mount your grin cache to run inside the container.

docker run -it -d -v $HOME/.grin:/root/.grin grin

If you prefer to use a docker named volume, you can pass -v dotgrin:/root/.grin instead. Using a named volume copies default configurations upon volume creation.