Running a Decred Node on Digital Ocean

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Setting up Digital Ocean settings

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First we will go to "Settings" and then click on "Security".

We will then add an SSH key. To do this we will use SSH-keygen.

Running ssh-keygen -t rsa will generate an SSH key for us.

You will be required to create a passphrase (I recommend using a tool like LastPass or 1Pass).

Then run pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub to put your key into your clipboard.

Copy and paste.

Creating the Droplet.

Select the droplets screen.

It is best to select Ubuntu 16.04 since this is what this guide used.

I then recommend selection the $5/mo droplet size.

You can select any region you wish, I chose Toronto.

Make sure your SSH key is selected if you set that up.

Creating a User

To create a user we run adduser username. We then make this user to the sudo group with usermod -aG sudo username.

We must then allow this user to connect using our public key. On our host machine run pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.

Now, back on the server run su - username to login to that user. Now, mkdir ~/.ssh and chmod 700 ~/.ssh to create the .ssh dir and allow writing.

Now copy and paste your public key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. Then restrict the permissions with chmod 600 ~/.ssh. We can now login with the new user.

We now disable root by changing PermitRootLogin yes to PermitRootLogin no in /etc/ssh/sshd_config, and then restart the SSH daemon with sudo service sshd restart.

Downloading Decred

Download the correct Decred install for your machine from Github. If you're using a Digital Ocean machine you want the Linux AMD64.


        $ wget https://github.com/decred/decred-release/releases/download/v1.0.1/dcrinstall-linux-amd64-v1.0.1

Next make the download executable.

$ chmod +x dcrinstall-linux-amd64-v1.0.1

Now, execute the node and follow the install process.


        $ ./dcrinstall-linux-amd64-v1.0.1

You will be prompted to either create or import a wallet. If you're creating a wallet consider using a tool like LastPass to create a secure password.

Installing Supervisor

Supervisor is a process control system that is quite easy to interface with. We will use it to ensure the node daemon is constantly running.


        $ sudo apt-get update
        $ sudo apt-get upgrade
        $ sudo apt-get install supervisor

Setting Everything In Motion

We will now create a file for Supervisor to autostart the Decred Node Daemon.

Create /etc/supervisor/conf.d/decred.conf using sudo /touch /etc/supervisor/conf.d/decred.conf.


        [program:decred]
        command=~/decred/dcrd
        autostart=true
        autorestart=true
        stderr_logfile=/var/log/supervisor/decred.err.log
        stdout_logfile=/var/log/supervisor/decred.out.log