Quantus Network Node Installation Guide

This guide will help you install and run a Quantus Network node for mining.

🚀 Quick Start Mining: See our Mining Guide for a comprehensive setup tutorial with troubleshooting and optimization tips.

Quantus Network Node

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Prerequisites

Use nightly rust version 12-24 or newer. Rust stable channel will not work.

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
rustup toolchain install nightly
rustup default nightly

Check your version to make sure

cargo --version
cargo 1.85.0-nightly (769f622e1 2024-12-14)

CLI Quantus commands

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Standard address pair generation

Generate new key

./quantus-node key quantus

This creates a new 24 word phrase, seed, and public and private keys.

Restore key from seed phrase (24 words)

./quantus-node key quantus --words "<words>"

Words are 24 words list separated by spaces, like "autumn bear... ". The words must be from the bip39 wordlist.

Restore key seed (64 bit hex)

./quantus-node key quantus --seed "<64-HEX-STRING>"

Seed must be a 64-character hex string

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Rewards address

By providing the optional --rewards-address parameter, the node will start sending mining and transaction rewards after each block confirmation by the runtime. If this address is not specified, rewards will not be minted.

./quantus-node --chain local --validator --rewards-address <NODE_OPERATOR_ADDRESS>

Local dev run

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1. Build the release binary

2. Run the node with --dev flag

./target/release/quantus-node --dev

Run with External Miner

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This node supports offloading the QPoW mining process to a separate service, freeing up node resources.

Any service that adheres to the API spec below can be used as miner by the node. We provide a sample implementation in the 'miner' crate.

API classes are defined in the 'resonance-miner-api' crate.

**API Spec: ** openapi.yaml

1. Build Node & Miner:

   # From workspace root
   cargo build --release -p quantus-node

2. Run External Miner: (In a separate terminal)

   git clone https://github.com/Quantus-Network/quantus-miner
   cd quantus-miner
   cargo build --release
   RUST_LOG=info ./target/release/quantus-miner

   (Listens on http://127.0.0.1:9833 by default)

3. Run Node: (In another terminal)

   # From workspace root (replace <YOUR_REWARDS_ADDRESS>)
   RUST_LOG=info,sc_consensus_pow=debug ./target/release/quantus-node \
    --dev \
    --external-miner-url http://127.0.0.1:9833 \
    --rewards-address <YOUR_REWARDS_ADDRESS>

Multinode local run

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To run a local testnet with multiple validator nodes, use the provided script:

# From workspace root
./scripts/run_local_nodes.sh

This script handles building the node and launching two validator nodes and a listener node connected to each other. Refer to the script comments for configuration details.

Build

Use the following command to build the node without launching it:

cargo build --release

Linting

We use taplo for formatting toml files and fmt for Rust.

taplo format --config taplo.toml
cargo fmt --all --check

Embedded Docs

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After you build the project, you can use the following command to explore its parameters and subcommands:

./target/release/quantus-node -h

You can generate and view the Rust Docs for this template with this command:

cargo +nightly doc --open

Single-Node Development Chain

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The following command starts a single-node development chain that doesn't persist state:

./target/release/quantus-node --dev

To purge the development chain's state, run the following command:

./target/release/quantus-node purge-chain --dev

To start the development chain with detailed logging, run the following command:

RUST_BACKTRACE=1 ./target/release/quantus-node -ldebug --dev

Development chains:

• Maintain state in a tmp folder while the node is running.
• Use the Alice and Bob accounts as default validator authorities.
• Use the Alice account as the default sudo account.
• Are preconfigured with a genesis state (/node/src/chain_spec.rs) that includes several pre-funded development accounts.

To persist chain state between runs, specify a base path by running a command similar to the following:

// Create a folder to use as the db base path
$ mkdir my-chain-state

// Use of that folder to store the chain state
$ ./target/release/quantus-node --dev --base-path ./my-chain-state/

// Check the folder structure created inside the base path after running the chain
$ ls ./my-chain-state
chains
$ ls ./my-chain-state/chains/
dev
$ ls ./my-chain-state/chains/dev
db keystore network

Database Storage Configuration

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This chain has mandatory storage configuration settings that cannot be overridden by command-line parameters:

Blocks Pruning: KeepFinalized

State Pruning: ArchiveCanonical

What this means

ArchiveCanonical State Pruning: The node will keep the state for all blocks that are part of the canonical chain. This ensures you can query historical state for any finalized block, while non-canonical blocks' states are pruned to save disk space.

KeepFinalized Blocks Pruning: The node will keep all finalized blocks and prune non-finalized blocks that become stale.

Command-line Parameters

Note that any command-line parameters related to pruning (--state-pruning, --blocks-pruning) will be ignored as these settings are enforced at the code level for all node operators. Disk Usage

This configuration provides a good balance between storage efficiency and data availability. You should expect your database to grow steadily over time as the blockchain progresses, though at a slower rate than a full archive node. If you're running a validator or service that needs access to historical chain state, this configuration will meet your needs while optimizing disk usage.

Connect with Polkadot-JS Apps Front-End

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After you start the node template locally, you can interact with it using the hosted version of the Polkadot/Substrate Portal front-end by connecting to the local node endpoint. A hosted version is also available on IPFS. You can also find the source code and instructions for hosting your own instance in the polkadot-js/apps repository.

Multi-Node Local Testnet

If you want to see the multi-node consensus algorithm in action, see Simulate a network.

Template Structure

A Substrate project such as this consists of a number of components that are spread across a few directories.

Node

A blockchain node is an application that allows users to participate in a blockchain network. Substrate-based blockchain nodes expose a number of capabilities:

• Networking: Substrate nodes use the libp2p networking stack to allow the nodes in the network to communicate with one another.
• Consensus: Blockchains must have a way to come to consensus on the state of the network. Substrate makes it possible to supply custom consensus engines and also ships with several consensus mechanisms that have been built on top of Web3 Foundation research.
• RPC Server: A remote procedure call (RPC) server is used to interact with Substrate nodes.

There are several files in the node directory. Take special note of the following:

• chain_spec.rs: A chain specification is a source code file that defines a Substrate chain's initial (genesis) state. Chain specifications are useful for development and testing, and critical when architecting the launch of a production chain. Take note of the development_config and testnet_genesis functions. These functions are used to define the genesis state for the local development chain configuration. These functions identify some well-known accounts and use them to configure the blockchain's initial state.
• service.rs: This file defines the node implementation. Take note of the libraries that this file imports and the names of the functions it invokes. In particular, there are references to consensus-related topics, such as the block finalization and forks and other consensus mechanisms such as Aura for block authoring and GRANDPA for finality.

Runtime

In Substrate, the terms "runtime" and "state transition function" are analogous. Both terms refer to the core logic of the blockchain that is responsible for validating blocks and executing the state changes they define. The Substrate project in this repository uses FRAME to construct a blockchain runtime. FRAME allows runtime developers to declare domain-specific logic in modules called "pallets". At the heart of FRAME is a helpful macro language that makes it easy to create pallets and flexibly compose them to create blockchains that can address a variety of needs.

Review the FRAME runtime implementation included in this template and note the following:

• This file configures several pallets to include in the runtime. Each pallet configuration is defined by a code block that begins with impl $PALLET_NAME::Config for Runtime.
• The pallets are composed into a single runtime by way of the construct_runtime! macro, which is part of the core FRAME pallet library.

Pallets

The runtime in this project is constructed using many FRAME pallets that ship with the Substrate repository and a template pallet that is defined in the pallets directory.

A FRAME pallet is comprised of a number of blockchain primitives, including:

• Storage: FRAME defines a rich set of powerful storage abstractions that makes it easy to use Substrate's efficient key-value database to manage the evolving state of a blockchain.
• Dispatchables: FRAME pallets define special types of functions that can be invoked (dispatched) from outside of the runtime in order to update its state.
• Events: Substrate uses events to notify users of significant state changes.
• Errors: When a dispatchable fails, it returns an error.

Each pallet has its own Config trait which serves as a configuration interface to generically define the types and parameters it depends on.

Alternatives Installations

Instead of installing dependencies and building this source directly, consider the following alternatives.

Nix

Install nix and nix-direnv for a fully plug-and-play experience for setting up the development environment. To get all the correct dependencies, activate direnv direnv allow.

Docker

Please follow the Substrate Docker instructions here to build the Docker container with the Substrate Node Template binary.

try-runtime

Compile the node with the try-runtime feature enabled to use the runtime wasm for try-runtime check:

cargo build --release --features try-runtime

try-runtime --runtime target/release/wbuild/quantus-runtime/quantus_runtime.wasm on-runtime-upgrade --disable-spec-version-check --blocktime 10000 live --uri <WS_URL>