docs/_core/best-practices.md

Hardware and OS requirements

• A 64-bit CPU running at at least 1 GHz is highly recommended (but not strictly required)
• You will need ~250MB RAM and ~10 GB disk free. Do not attempt to use a network-attached disk for this.
• You should have at least 30,000 inodes free in your filesystem. Unless you are using a very small VM image, you almost certainly have enough (you can check with df -i).
• TCP port 6264 should be open and support bidirectional traffic. If you want to use SSL, then port 6263 should be open.
• A reliable Internet connection of DSL-like quality or higher

Deployment

The Easy Way

• Install from pip, source code, or Docker
• Run blockstack-core fast_sync
• Run blockstack-core start

The Less Easy Way

• Install from pip, source code, or Docker
• Run blockstack-core start
• Wait a few days

Best Practices for the Less Easy Way

• Take a blockstack-server.snapshots database from a known-good node and pass --expected_snapshots=/path/to/blockstack-server.snapshots. This will force your bootstrapping node to verify that it reaches the same sequence of consensus hashes as it bootstraps (i.e. your node will detect any divergence from Blockstack's name history and abort early, instead of wasting your time).
• Make sure you're in a position to leave the node online at 100% CPU use for the duration of its bootstrapping period

The Hard Way

• Install bitcoind (version 0.16.x is recommended for now)
• Start bitcoind as bitcoind -daemon -txindex=1
• Wait for bitcoind to download the entire blockchain. This can take between 1 hour and 1 day.
• Install blockstack-core from source, pip, or Docker
• Run blockstack-core configure and enter your bitcoind node's IP address, port, RPC username, and RPC password when prompted
• Run blockstack-core start
• Wait a few days

Best Practices for the Hard Way

• You're going to need ~500 GB of space for the Bitcoin blockchain state
• You can safely store its chain state on a network-attached disk, if you're doing this in a cloud-hosted environment
• Your bitcoind host will need TCP:8332-8333 open for bidirectional traffic

Troubleshooting

The node stops responding to TCP:6264

• Check dmesg for TCP SYN flooding. The solution here is to kill and restart the node.
• To mitigate, install a rate-limiting proxy HTTP server in front of the node. We have a sample config for nginx here.

No other Blockstack nodes contact my node

• Verify that your IP address is publicly-routable, and that peers can communicate on TCP:6264

People are attacking my Bitcoin node

• Stick an nginx reverse proxy in front of your bitcoind node, and use our nginx scripts to limit APi access to only the JSON-RPC methods Blockstack actually needs. Better yet, do what we do---build a statically-linked bitcoind binary from source that simply omits all of the RPC methods except the ones listed in the linked config file.