NOTE: This doc was created in 2018 and is no longer being kept up-to-date. There are some useful updates and Q&A in the comments, and Google has since disallowed cryptocurrency nodes explicitly in their Terms of Service. While I work on an updated how-to-run-a-node tutorial, you are welcome to join our ETH developer chat and share what you'd like to work on.
https://matrix.to/#/#invisible-college/cryptocoin:matrix.org?via=matrix.org&via=t2bot.io
The first step to setting up an Ethereum development environment is running a node. Public nodes run by MyEtherWallet and Augur are great public services. However, you cannot always attach your private keys securely to such a node, and so you are limited to read-only interactions (reading contract variables, checking account balances). Moreover, you cannot always upload contracts reliably due to (Solidity) compiler incompatibilities.
The most reliable option is to run your own node.
You can run a node locally on your laptop or local computer, such as described in the Christmas classic How To Get on Rinkeby Testnet in 10 minutes. However this won't work for people who are behind a firewall that does not permit incoming public TCP/UDP connections on port 30303 (the default), or any new port. Like many home users on their ISP's network. Also, are you expected to just keep your laptop open and running all the time, draining battery power and hogging your coffeeshop's wifi, like a chump? No way!
The answer is to let the world's most too-powerful tech company run your node for you, for free. (Way!)
This write-up will teach you how to run an Ethereum node on Google Cloud Product (GCP).
You can get a free 1 year trial with $300 worth of credit by signing up with a new email address. Don't worry, you'll be prompted when your free trial expires before your credit card gets charged. If you own your own domain, you can create an infinite supply of email addresses to make bot accounts. (Disclaimer: I neither endorse nor condemn this course of action 👿 )
You'll get a popup asking you if it's okay that they snoop on what restaurants you search for and your current location on your Android phone.
(How do you think they got to be the world's most too-powerful company). Do you want to run a free node or not?
Pray a hail mary and make peace with your bot's lost privacy, then click I Agree.
Check your email and click the link to verify your account. You'll be taken to your Google Cloud console,
but you can get there by going to http://cloud.google.com and clicking Console
The console is your central landing page where you'll start every time you work with GCP. Here you can view all your current services and their usage, as well as create / add new services, access your cloud shell, edit your profile, access your billing settings, etc.
Agree to the Terms of Service (you should probably skim it).
Note the banner that says
Sign up for a free trial and you’ll get $300 in credit and 12 months to explore Google Cloud Platform.
Keep an eye on this every time you sign in. You'll see it go down over time. It's pretty hard to make it last one year in my experience.
The available services you can run on GCP are grouped into categories. These include databases, message queues, and lots of fancy stuff. We'll start with the most basic service, compute.
The basic unit of compute on GCP is a Virtual Machine.
Think of it as a dynamically allocated Linux computer that you can initialize and tear down on demand.
We'll use Ubuntu because of its widespread community support, especially on the Ethereum wiki.
It also has a large number of available packages so you can download and install your favorite tools
with apt.
On the left sidebar menu, under the Compute Engine section you can choose VM Instances, or you can
navigate directly to https://console.cloud.google.com/projectselector/compute/instances
You'll see the following screen to create a project (call it something like Ethereum Node) and click Create.
A project is a collection of instantiated services that are running, with real data, and are consuming both resources like CPU and RAM on Google's machines as well as using up money in your $300 free trial.
You can have multiple projects to work on multiple apps or systems simultaneously.
For example after this tutorial is over, you might create another project to run a Bitcoin node as well.
We'll just assume we are working with a single Ethereum Node project for now.
If you get lost below, you can always return to your projects by clicking on Console
You'll be taken to a screen where you will again be tempted to sign up for spam
and you sign away more rights, in case you managed to smuggle them past the other Agree buttons that you clicked.
After you click Agree and continue enter in your customer info, including your credit card info (not shown, lol).
This won't be charged after your free trial is over. It's probably just used to verify your identity and safeguard against
you using GCP for any illegal purpose.
Then click Start my free trial, and get a nice welcome.
Go ahead and click Tour the console to get a basic primer on how to work this thing.
I'll wait. It might not work, i.e. you get a message that says
We can't guide you at this time.
Sad. Anyway, when you're ready, return to the VM Instances dashboard.
Back in your project dashboard, you'll be given an option to create new VMs.
There are other options too (import and take the quickstart) but don't do those right now.
Import would let you import other VM instances, e.g. from other projects or other GCP users, or snapshots of even this project in the past.
Take the quickstart would let you build a sample app.
In the next screen, you'll get to choose the operating system image. The default is Debian 9, but as discussed above, we'll use Ubuntu. However, if you're experienced and want to run with a more barebones image that you can customize like Debian, etc. you can choose those as well. You're on your own as far as the rest of this tutorial is concerned, however.
Note the helpful hint on the right sidebar that this VM instance will consume $24.67 per month of your free trial.
Click Change and select Ubuntu 16.04 LTS as well.
Accept the other defaults.
Then finally click Create.
You'll be returned to the VM instances dashboard where you can see your instance running.
Choose to SSH (log in via secure shell) by choosing Open in browser window.
The following window will pop up. Congrats! You are now at a normal command-line shell (bash) that you can use to control your VM instance.
This is our goal, a Linux computer for running an Ethereum node that is beyond your ISP's firewall. There is still a firewall of course, but this one is run by Google and is configurable per GCP user and per project.
You have a lot of control over this. Congrats! This concludes the first, and longer, part of the tutorial.
At this point, you can stop and use any other tutorial for starting up an Ethereum node (including running a Rinkeby node as described here). Those instructions are agnostic to what computer the node is running on, so just substitute all mentions of "laptop" for "GCP node" instead. They are manual ways of running an Ethereum node.
Install the latest Ethereum software.
sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:ethereum/ethereum
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ethereum
Run tmux to get two simultaneous pains.
Start up a light geth node in one tmux pane.
geth --light
You'll get a lot of output, perhaps after 20 seconds of silence when you're beginning to suspect that you have to open a firewall port after all. But you don't.
Eventually you'll see something like this:
NFO [10-22|23:42:15] Imported new block headers count=384 elapsed=131.296ms number=4410943 hash=3d2c70…78e1c5 ignored=0
INFO [10-22|23:42:17] Imported new block headers count=144 elapsed=2.204s number=4411087 hash=9c0c0e…8c686a ignored=0
INFO [10-22|23:42:17] Generating ethash verification cache epoch=148 percentage=63 elapsed=3.040s
INFO [10-22|23:42:18] Generated ethash verification cache epoch=148 elapsed=4.063s
INFO [10-22|23:42:28] Imported new block headers count=1 elapsed=9.008ms number=4411088 hash=09509b…2f4f29 ignored=0
INFO [10-22|23:42:34] Imported new block headers count=1 elapsed=8.219ms number=4411089 hash=29ab4c…7c926e ignored=0
INFO [10-22|23:42:46] Imported new block headers count=1 elapsed=8.903ms number=4411090 hash=5d6bc7…15fcef ignored=0
INFO [10-22|23:42:57] Imported new block headers count=1 elapsed=8.224ms number=4411091 hash=62f24e…c15650 ignored=0
INFO [10-22|23:43:17] Imported new block headers count=1 elapsed=8.382ms number=4411092 hash=639fbc…ad50b6 ignored=0
INFO [10-22|23:43:41] Imported new block headers count=1 elapsed=8.847ms number=4411093 hash=29d8aa…31f833 ignored=0
If you check Ethstats you'll see that you're now in sync with the main blockchain.
Isn't running an ethereum node on a centralized platform like GCP counter-intuitive to decentralization? Or am I mistaken?