Node Operator Tutorials
System Configuration
The following guide describes steps and best practices for configuring a Towns Stream Node after meeting the system requirements.
Node FE & Storage Configuration
1
Generate configuration associated with the Node Storage
Generate an ECDSA wallet that will serve as the Node identity to the storage layer and network. On Node FE startup, this wallet will be used to access the appropriate
database schema and to authenticate the Node FE to the Towns Chain during registration.
Only one unique Node FE (by wallet identity) can be associated with a Node Storage instance at a given time.
Generate node wallet identity with cast
Generate node wallet identity with cast
Wallets can quickly be generated on the command line with
cast.Generate node wallet identity with ethers.js
Generate node wallet identity with ethers.js
Wallets can also be generated with ethers.js package in javascript.
See below for an example in javascript.Then copy-paste the below into a file,
address.js. Run with node address.js to generate a new wallet and print key to console.2
Generate configuration associated with the Node FE
During this step, configure your Node FE image or binary
to run in your networked environment that has connectivity to the Node Storage instance
and set your Node FE environment variables, such as RPC_URL’s, logging level, contract addresses.Some of the required environment variables will be secrets as described in system requirements that will need to be stored and injected in your runtime securely.
Choices around secret storage depend largely on the cloud or on-premise hosting environment for the Node FE, which is left up
to the node operator.
3
Node Front End (FE)
Configure your Node FE with a publicly addressable, static IPv4 host, ensuring it can serve HTTP1.1 & HTTP2 requests.
If behind a termination proxy, configure accordingly. Ensure your network does not proxy traffic through an ALB as this
has been known to cause issues with client connectivity.Configure DNS with a hostname and either an A record or CNAME record to your static IPv4 address.
By convention, it is reccommended that hostnames for nodes in mainnet be defined on a per operator address basis with a subdomain using an airport code prefix distinct from other node operators as in
<airport-code>-<node_number>.<domain>. See mainnet node list for additional examples of the convention. Application level load balancers (ALBs) require a very specific configuration to handle
gRPC traffic as well as ALPN with HTTP1/2 and therefore are not supported at this time.Terminate TLS at your origin server and use a static IPv4 address for your Node FE. Network load balancers
are supported assuming 1 LB instance per origin.
4
Node Storage Setup
Set up Node Storage (e.g., Postgres), ensuring your Node FE can connect within your hosting network.Run network probes on the Node FE in info mode to ensure network connectivity, TLS termination, and that the node is publicly addressable over DNS.