Skip to main content

Run an EVM Tracing Node

Overview​

Running a tracing node on an Astar chain allows you to debug EVM transactions and have enhanced access to transaction pool using EVM debug RPC.

Requirements​

Requirements for running any node are similar to what we recommend for archive node. Read more about this here.

Node launch​

Tracing node setup in general is equal to Archive Node setup. Except binary location and additional launch flags.

info

EVM tracing node binary is different because includes additional tracing features. You can easily build it from source code using cargo build --release --features evm-tracing command or download from latest release, binary should contains tracing in artifact name. For example, astar-collator-v5.1.0-tracing-ubuntu-x86_64.tar.gz.

info

EVM RPC calls are disabled by default, and require additional flag to be enabled. Please refer to this page for more info.

Runtime overriding​

Tracing runtimes has additional debug API that makes possible deep (and slow) transaction debugging. For this reason it's not part of production runtimes. So, for using tracing features current runtime must be overrided by special tracing runtime according to current on-chain runtime version.

For example, if current rutime is astar-52 then astar-runtime-52-substitute-tracing.wasm blob should be used for overriding. Usually tracing runtime published in release assets, please check latest release here.

For runtime override please create folder somewhere node can access it, by default it could be /var/lib/astar/wasm. And then copy overriding runtime into this folder.

mkdir /var/lib/astar/wasm
cp astar-runtime-52-substitute-tracing.wasm /var/lib/astar/wasm
chown -hR astar /var/lib/astar/wasm

When wasm blob located correctly the node launch string should be addicted by --wasm-runtime-overrides=/var/lib/astar/wasm flag. Then service should be restarted, if all go well then node will catch up tracing runtime and substitute on-chain version by it.

Service parameters​

The service file for a tracing node will look like this

tip

Please make sure to change {NODE_NAME}

[Unit]
Description=Astar EVM tracing node

[Service]
User=astar
Group=astar
  
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/astar-collator \
  --pruning archive \
  --rpc-cors all \
  --name {NODE_NAME} \
  --chain shibuya \
  --base-path /var/lib/astar \
  --state-pruning archive \
  --blocks-pruning archive \
  --ws-external \
  --rpc-methods Safe \
  --rpc-max-request-size 10 \
  --rpc-max-response-size 10 \
  --enable-evm-rpc  \
  --ethapi=txpool,debug,trace \
  --wasm-runtime-overrides /var/lib/astar/wasm \
  --telemetry-url 'wss://telemetry.polkadot.io/submit/ 0' \

Restart=always
RestartSec=10

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target