This document is an easy to follow guide to installing and running your own Electrum server on Linux. It is structured as a series of steps you need to follow, ordered in the most logical way. The next two sections describe some conventions we use in this document and the hardware, software, and expertise requirements.
The most up-to date version of this document is available at:
https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum-server/blob/master/HOWTO.md
In this document, lines starting with a hash sign (#) or a dollar sign (
Strings that are surrounded by "lower than" and "greater than" ( < and > ) should be replaced by the user with something appropriate. For example, <password> should be replaced by a user chosen password. Do not confuse this notation with shell redirection ('command < file' or 'command > file')!
Lines that lack hash or dollar signs are pastes from config files. They should be copied verbatim or adapted without the indentation tab.
apt-get install commands are suggestions for required dependencies. They conform to an Ubuntu 13.10 system but may well work with Debian or earlier and later versions of Ubuntu.
Expertise. You should be familiar with Linux command line and standard Linux commands. You should have a basic understanding of git and Python packages. You should have knowledge about how to install and configure software on your Linux distribution. You should be able to add commands to your distribution's startup scripts. If one of the commands included in this document is not available or does not perform the operation described here, you are expected to fix the issue so you can continue following this howto.
Software. A recent Linux 64-bit distribution with the following software
installed: python, easy_install, git, standard C/C++
build chain. You will need root access in order to install other software or
Python libraries. Python 2.7 is the minimum supported version.
Hardware. The lightest setup is a pruning server with diskspace requirements of about 10 GB for the electrum database. However note that you also need to run bitcoind and keep a copy of the full blockchain, which is roughly 20 GB in April 2014. If you have less than 2 GB of RAM make sure you limit bitcoind to 8 concurrent connections. If you have more resources to spare you can run the server with a higher limit of historic transactions per address. CPU speed is important for the initial block chain import, but is also important if you plan to run a public Electrum server, which could serve tens of concurrent requests. Any multi-core x86 CPU from 2009 or newer other than an Atom should do for good performance. An ideal setup has enough RAM to hold and process the leveldb database in tmpfs (e.g. /dev/shm).
This step is optional, but for better security and resource separation I
suggest you create a separate user just for running bitcoind and Electrum.
We will also use the ~/bin directory to keep locally installed files
(others might want to use /usr/local/bin instead). We will download source
code files to the ~/src directory.
$ sudo adduser bitcoin --disabled-password
$ sudo apt-get install git
$ sudo su - bitcoin
$ mkdir ~/bin ~/src
$ echo $PATH
If you don't see /home/bitcoin/bin in the output, you should add this line
to your .bashrc, .profile, or .bash_profile, then logout and relogin:
PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
$ exit
Older versions of Electrum used to require a patched version of bitcoind. This is not the case anymore since bitcoind supports the 'txindex' option. We currently recommend bitcoind 0.10.1 stable.
If your package manager does not supply a recent bitcoind or you prefer to compile it yourself, here are some pointers for Ubuntu:
$ sudo apt-get install make g++ python-leveldb libboost-all-dev libssl-dev libdb++-dev pkg-config
$ sudo su - bitcoin
$ cd ~/src && wget https://bitcoin.org/bin/0.10.1/bitcoin-0.10.1.tar.gz
$ sha256sum bitcoin-0.10.1.tar.gz | grep 287873f9ba4fd49cd4e4be7eba070d2606878f1690c5be0273164d37cbf3c138
$ tar xfz bitcoin-0.10.1.tar.gz
$ cd bitcoin-0.10.1
$ ./configure --disable-wallet --without-miniupnpc
$ make
$ strip src/bitcoind src/bitcoin-cli src/bitcoin-tx
$ cp -a src/bitcoind src/bitcoin-cli src/bitcoin-tx ~/bin
In order to allow Electrum to "talk" to bitcoind, we need to set up an RPC
username and password for bitcoind. We will then start bitcoind and
wait for it to complete downloading the blockchain.
$ mkdir ~/.bitcoin
$ $EDITOR ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf
Write this in bitcoin.conf:
rpcuser=<rpc-username>
rpcpassword=<rpc-password>
daemon=1
txindex=1
If you have an existing installation of bitcoind and have not previously set txindex=1 you need to reindex the blockchain by running
$ bitcoind -reindex
If you already have a freshly indexed copy of the blockchain with txindex start bitcoind:
$ bitcoind
Allow some time to pass for bitcoind to connect to the network and start
downloading blocks. You can check its progress by running:
$ bitcoin-cli getblockchaininfo
Before starting the electrum server your bitcoind should have processed all blocks and caught up to the current height of the network (not just the headers). You should also set up your system to automatically start bitcoind at boot time, running as the 'bitcoin' user. Check your system documentation to find out the best way to do this.
We will download the latest git snapshot for Electrum to configure and install it:
$ cd ~
$ git clone https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum-server.git
$ cd electrum-server
$ sudo configure
$ sudo python setup.py install
See the INSTALL file for more information about the configure and install commands.
Electrum server depends on various standard Python libraries and leveldb. These will usually be installed by caling "python setup.py install" above. They can be also be installed with your package manager if you don't want to use the install routine
$ sudo apt-get install python-setuptools python-openssl python-leveldb libleveldb-dev
$ sudo easy_install jsonrpclib irc plyvel
Regarding leveldb see the steps in README.leveldb for further details, especially if your system doesn't have the python-leveldb package or if plyvel installation fails.
leveldb should be at least version 1.9.0. Earlier version are believed to be buggy.
Electrum server uses leveldb to store transactions. You can choose how many spent transactions per address you want to store on the server. The default is 100, but there are also servers with 1000 or even 10000. Few addresses have more than 10000 transactions. A limit this high can be considered equivalent to a "full" server. Full servers previously used abe to store the blockchain. The use of abe for electrum servers is now deprecated.
The pruning server uses leveldb and keeps a smaller and faster database by pruning spent transactions. It's a lot quicker to get up and running and requires less maintenance and diskspace than abe.
The section in the electrum server configuration file (see step 10) looks like this:
[leveldb]
path = /path/to/your/database
# for each address, history will be pruned if it is longer than this limit
pruning_limit = 100
It's recommended to fetch a pre-processed leveldb from the net. The "configure" script above will offer you to download a database with pruning limit 100.
You can fetch recent copies of electrum leveldb databases with differnt pruning limits and further instructions from the Electrum full archival server foundry at: http://foundry.electrum.org/
Alternatively, if you have the time and nerve, you can import the blockchain yourself.
As of April 2014 it takes between two days and over a week to import 300k blocks, depending on CPU speed, I/O speed, and your selected pruning limit.
It's considerably faster and strongly recommended to index in memory. You can use /dev/shm or or create a tmpfs which will also use swap if you run out of memory:
$ sudo mount -t tmpfs -o rw,nodev,nosuid,noatime,size=15000M,mode=0777 none /tmpfs
If you use tmpfs make sure you have enough RAM and swap to cover the size. If you only have 4 gigs of RAM but add 15 gigs of swap from a file that's fine too. tmpfs is rather smart to swap out the least used parts. It's fine to use a file on an SSD for swap in this case.
It's not recommended to do initial indexing of the database on an SSD because the indexing process does at least 20 TB (!) of disk writes and puts considerable wear-and-tear on an SSD. It's a lot better to use tmpfs and just swap out to disk when necessary.
Databases have grown to roughly 8 GB in April 2014, give or take a gigabyte between pruning limits 100 and 10000. Leveldb prunes the database from time to time, so it's not uncommon to see databases ~50% larger at times when it's writing a lot, especially when indexing from the beginning.
[Note: SSL certificates signed by a CA are supported by 2.0 clients.]
To run SSL / HTTPS you need to generate a self-signed certificateusing openssl. You could just comment out the SSL / HTTPS ports in the config and run without, but this is not recommended.
Use the sample code below to create a self-signed cert with a recommended validity of 5 years. You may supply any information for your sign request to identify your server. They are not currently checked by the client except for the validity date. When asked for a challenge password just leave it empty and press enter.
$ openssl genrsa -des3 -passout pass:x -out server.pass.key 2048
$ openssl rsa -passin pass:x -in server.pass.key -out server.key
writing RSA key
$ rm server.pass.key
$ openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr
...
Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:US
State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:California
Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []: electrum-server.tld
...
A challenge password []:
...
$ openssl x509 -req -days 730 -in server.csr -signkey server.key -out server.crt
The server.crt file is your certificate suitable for the ssl_certfile= parameter and server.key corresponds to ssl_keyfile= in your electrum server config.
Starting with Electrum 1.9, the client will learn and locally cache the SSL certificate for your server upon the first request to prevent man-in-the middle attacks for all further connections.
If your certificate is lost or expires on the server side, you will need to run your server with a different server name and a new certificate. Therefore it's a good idea to make an offline backup copy of your certificate and key in case you need to restore it.
Electrum reads a config file (/etc/electrum.conf) when starting up. This file includes the database setup, bitcoind RPC setup, and a few other options.
The "configure" script listed above will create a config file at /etc/electrum.conf which you can edit to modify the settings.
Go through the config options and set them to your liking. If you intend to run the server publicly have a look at README-IRC.md
Electrum server currently needs quite a few file handles to use leveldb. It also requires file handles for each connection made to the server. It's good practice to increase the open files limit to 64k.
The "configure" script will take care of this and ask you to create a user for running electrum-server. If you're using user bitcoin to run electrum and have added it manually like shown in this HOWTO run the following code to add the limits to your /etc/security/limits.conf:
echo "bitcoin hard nofile 65536" >> /etc/security/limits.conf
echo "bitcoin soft nofile 65536" >> /etc/security/limits.conf
Two more things for you to consider:
-
To increase security you may want to close bitcoind for incoming connections and connect outbound only
-
Consider restarting bitcoind (together with electrum-server) on a weekly basis to clear out unconfirmed transactions from the local the memory pool which did not propagate over the network.
The magic moment has come: you can now start your Electrum server as root (it will su to your unprivileged user):
# electrum-server start
Note: If you want to run the server without installing it on your system, just run 'run_electrum_server" as the unprivileged user.
You should see this in the log file:
starting Electrum server
If you want to stop Electrum server, use the 'stop' command:
# electrum-server stop
If your system supports it, you may add electrum-server to the /etc/init.d directory. This will ensure that the server is started and stopped automatically, and that the database is closed safely whenever your machine is rebooted.
# ln -s `which electrum-server` /etc/init.d/electrum-server
# update-rc.d electrum-server defaults
We will assume you have a working Electrum client, a wallet, and some transactions history. You should start the client and click on the green checkmark (last button on the right of the status bar) to open the Server selection window. If your server is public, you should see it in the list and you can select it. If you server is private, you need to enter its IP or hostname and the port. Press 'Ok' and the client will disconnect from the current server and connect to your new Electrum server. You should see your addresses and transactions history. You can see the number of blocks and response time in the Server selection window. You should send/receive some bitcoins to confirm that everything is working properly.
Say hi to the dev crew, other server operators, and fans on irc.freenode.net #electrum and we'll try to congratulate you on supporting the community by running an Electrum node.
If you're operating a public Electrum server please subscribe to or regulary check the following thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=85475.0 It'll contain announcements about important updates to Electrum server required for a smooth user experience.