The Koinos Blockchain consists of multiple interdependent microservices that communicate via AMQP. Each microservice has been dockerized and can easily be run as a unit with Docker Compose.

Images are automatically uploaded to Docker Hub. latest tracks master on each microservice repo. Feature branches are uploaded with their branch name as the image tag.

You will need to install Docker on MacOS or Windows first . You can follow their instructions for installation here. Docker desktop comes with a recent version of docker-compose.

You may need to upgrade your version of docker-compose on Linux. Ubuntu 20.04 does not come with a recent enough version. Your mileage may vary depending on your distribution. You can follow the official installation instructions to upgrade your version of docker-compose if needed. At the time of writing, the current docker-compose version was 1.29.2.

Once docker-compose is installed, run docker-compose up to start a Koinos node.

By default, each container will use ~/.koinos on the host as their base directory. This can be changed by setting BASEDIR in .env, or exporting BASEDIR, to a different location on the host machine.

You will find config.yml in the base directory, which can be modified to change config on the microservices. At present, you need to restart docker compose for the new config to be applied. (That is a future TODO)

Different images can be run by setting environment variables or setting them in .env. For each microservice, append _TAG (e.g. export P2P_TAG=64-auto-gossip).

By default the node will only run core required microservices (chain, block_store, mempool, and p2p).

You can run optional microservices by enabling the associated docker compose profiles:

• block_producer to enable the block production.
• jsonrpc to enable JSON-RPC API handling.
• transaction_store to enable transaction history tracking.

These profiles can be set with the --profile options (i.e. docker-compose --profile api up ) or by setting the COMPOSE_PROFILES environment variable during invocation or in .env.

For more information on docker compose profiles, please read the official documentation.