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Run an RPC Node (with nearup)

We encourage you to set up your node with Neard instead of Nearup as Nearup is not used on Mainnet. Please head to Run a Node for instructions on how to setup a RPC node with Neard.

Heads up

The README for nearup (linked above) may be all you need to get a node up and running in testnet and localnet. nearup is exclusively used to launch NEAR testnet and localnet nodes. nearup is not used to launch mainnet nodes.

Prerequisites​

Steps to Run an RPC Node using nearup​

Running a RPC node is very similar to running a validator node as both types of node use the same nearcore release. The main difference for running a validator node is requiring validator_key.json to be used by the validator node to support its work of validating blocks and chunks on the network.

First, clone the nearcore repo:

git clone https://github.com/near/nearcore.git
cd nearcore

Checkout the version you wish to build:

git checkout <version>

You can then run:

make neard

This will compile the neard binary for the version you have checked out, it will be available under target/release/neard.

Note that compilation will need over 1 GB of memory per virtual core the machine has. If the build fails with processes being killed, you might want to try reducing number of parallel jobs, for example: CARGO_BUILD_JOBS=8 make neard.

NB. Please ensure you build releases through make rather than cargo build --release. The latter skips some optimizations (most notably link-time optimisation) and thus produces a less efficient executable.

nearup run testnet --binary-path path/to/nearcore/target/release

You will then be prompted for an Account ID below. You should leave this empty as you are running an RPC node, not a validator node.

Enter your account ID (leave empty if not going to be a validator):

Wait until initialization finishes, use the following command to follow logs:

  $ nearup logs --follow

Then run:

  $ nearup stop

Retrieve a copy of the latest RPC snapshot from S3 using rclone: Prerequisite:

Recommended download client rclone. This tool is present in many Linux distributions. There is also a version for Windows. And its main merit is multithread. You can read about it on ** rclone version needs to be v1.66.0 or higher

First, install rclone:

$ sudo -v ; curl https://rclone.org/install.sh | sudo bash

Next, prepare config, so you don't need to specify all the parameters interactively:

mkdir -p ~/.config/rclone
touch ~/.config/rclone/rclone.conf

, and paste exactly the following config into rclone.conf:

[near_cf]
type = s3
provider = AWS
download_url = https://dcf58hz8pnro2.cloudfront.net/
acl = public-read
server_side_encryption = AES256
region = ca-central-1

$ rclone copy --no-check-certificate near_cf://near-protocol-public/backups/testnet/rpc/latest ./
$ LATEST=$(cat latest)
$ rclone copy --no-check-certificate --progress --transfers=6 --checkers=6 \
  near_cf://near-protocol-public/backups/testnet/rpc/${latest:?} ~/.near/data

Finally, run the following command and the node should start syncing headers:

  $ nearup run testnet

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