Deploying an Ethereum Archive Node on bare metal

In order to run your own Indexer on Ethereum Network, you need to have a fast and reliable entry point. There are several providers offering Ethereum Node as a Service, but their free trials are quite limited, and paid services quickly get expensive.

The most cost-effective and reliable way is to run your own Ethereum Archive Node. The Archive Node provides an archive of Blockhain’s historical states. This type of node is useful when querying historical blockchain data that is not accessible on full nodes.

For our Archive Node, we have selected a bare-metal server on Hetzner with mirrored NVMe-SSD drives. For reliable indexing, this is not the place to save money. Nodes are resource hungry and there is no skimping on hardware.

We will use Erigon(https://github.com/ledgerwatch/erigon) implementation. Having used it previously, it has always impressed us with a quick sync and relatively low space requirements. At the time of writing the full Archive Ethereum Node needs just over 2TB of space.

With the upcoming Ethereum Merge we will use the Alpha Version of the Erigon which is already “merge” compatible.

CPU	32
Memory	128G
Hard Drives	2×3.4TB SSD NVME
OS	Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS
Erigon version	v2022.08.03

Installing Erigon

Erigon does not distribute the binaries for their releases (besides their Docker containers). Since we are installing Erigon on a bare-metal server we just going to build it ourselves.

We will have to fetch the latest version of GO, Erigon source code and a few tools to build it on Ubuntu:

apt-get install -y build-essential wget git
mkdir downloads
cd downloads/
wget https://go.dev/dl/go1.19.linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar -C /usr/local -xzvf go1.19.linux-amd64.tar.gz
ln -s /usr/local/go/bin/go /usr/local/bin/go

Checkout and build Erigon software:

cd /root/
mkdir build
cd build
mkdir github && cd github
git clone https://github.com/ledgerwatch/erigon.git
cd erigon
git checkout v2022.08.03
make

Install it:

useradd -m -d /home/erigon -s /bin/bash erigon
mkdir /opt/erigon
cp -r ./build/bin /opt/erigon/

Configure the data folder assuming you /mnt/data directory is on an SSD volume:

mkdir -p /mnt/data/erigon
chown erigon:erigon /mnt/data/erigon

Create a Systemd Service for Erigon daemon to start automatically on boot and in case of failures:

cat <<EOF >> /etc/systemd/system/erigon.service1
[Unit]
Description=Erigon Ethereum Client

[Service]
User=erigon
WorkingDirectory=/home/erigon
ExecStart=/opt/erigon/bin/erigon --datadir=/mnt/data/erigon/ --private.api.addr=192.168.0.1:9090 --txpool.api.addr=192.168.0.1:9090 --http.addr=192.168.0.1 --ws --http.api=eth,erigon,web3,net,debug,trace,txpool --metrics --metrics.addr=192.168.0.1 --metrics.port=6060
Restart=always
RestartSec=5s

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF

systemctl enable erigon.service 
systemctl start erigon.service 

You should be able to see that Erigon has started successfully by checking logs in /var/log/syslog

Some configuration parameters we have used to start the service:

–datadir=/mnt/data/erigon/	Path to the folder where Erigon will create and store its Database. This should be located on SSD drives
–private.api.addr=192.168.0.1:9090	If you have multiple interfaces on your server, you want to listen only for connections on the local network
–ws	start web services API(this is needed for Graph Indexer)
–http.api=eth,erigon,web3,net,debug,trace,txpool	list of APIs to enable
–metrics –metrics.addr=192.168.0.1 –metrics.port=6060	enable metrics API and expose it on the local network

In this post, we are deploying Erigon with an RPC daemon running on a secure local network. If you are looking into exposing it via the WEB or want added security you need to look into “–authrpc.*” flags to add authentication.

Monitoring

For monitoring the Erigon Node, we will use our trusty Prometheus which is already deployed on our internal Kubernetes Cluster.

There are just a few things to do to add monitoring.

Add scraping config for an externally hosted API:

- job_name: erigon1
  static_configs:
  - targets:
    - erigon1:6060
    labels:
      host: erigon1
      app: erigon  
  metrics_path: /debug/metrics/prometheus

import Erigon Grafana Dashboard from the URL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ledgerwatch/erigon/devel/cmd/prometheus/dashboards/erigon.json

and watch for the Data to sync before we progress with the Graph Indexer Deployment