Setup Astar zkEVM Mainnet Permissionless RPC Node
Overview
Operators can deploy permissionless RPC nodes for Astar zkEVM.
DApp projects need to run their own RPC node to the retrieve necessary blockchain data and not to rely on public infrastructure. Public endpoints may respond slower because of the large amount of users connected, and are rate limited.
Requirements
System
Storage space requirements will increase as the network grows.
- 16GB RAM
- 4-core CPU
- 100GB Storage (This will increase over time)
Prerequisites
This tutorial requires docker and docker-compose to be installed on your machine. If you don’t have these installed, check out the links provided below:
Ethereum RPC Node
An Ethereum RPC node is required for running an Astar zkEVM node. There are two options available:
- Setup your own - the Geth client is one example.
- Use an RPC provider endpoint - developers building on Astar may be entitled to special offers or promos.
This document does not cover the installation of the Ethereum node. We will use a public RPC endpoint for this document, but keep in mind that this is not a viable production solution: public endpoints are rate limited and as a result, your Astar zkEVM node may not synchronize correctly.
Setting Up zkNode
In this section, we are going to start the five containers necessary for the Astar zkEVM RPC node to function:
- zkevm-rpc
- zkevm-sync
- zkevm-state-db
- zkevm-pool-db
- zkevm-prover
Let's build on this.
Create dedicated directories for install and data.
sudo mkdir /etc/zkevm && sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /etc/zkevm
sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/zkevm/{statedb,pooldb} && sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/lib/zkevm/
Set local variables.
# define installation and config path
ZKEVM_NET=mainnet
ZKEVM_DIR=/etc/zkevm
Download and extract the artifacts.
wget https://shared-assets.astar.network/files/zkevm/astar/astarzk.tar.gz
tar -xf astarzk.tar.gz -C $ZKEVM_DIR && rm astarzk.tar.gz
Copy the env file and edit the L1 RPC URL.
cp $ZKEVM_DIR/example.env $ZKEVM_DIR/.env
nano $ZKEVM_DIR/.env
Modify the parameters.
# Use your own Ethereum RPC URL here!!
ZKEVM_NODE_ETHERMAN_URL = "https://ethereum-rpc.publicnode.com"
Edit the node config file.
nano $ZKEVM_DIR/config/environments/mainnet/node.config.toml
Modify the following parameters, you may also want to change the databases default user/passwords for more security.
[Etherman]
# Set your own Ethereum RPC URL
URL = "https://ethereum-rpc.publicnode.com"
# Enable if you want to exploit metrics from nodes
[Metrics]
Enabled = true
Start the containers.
# start all the containers
sudo docker compose --env-file $ZKEVM_DIR/.env -f $ZKEVM_DIR/docker-compose.yml up -d
# or start containers on by one
sudo docker compose --env-file $ZKEVM_DIR/.env -f $ZKEVM_DIR/docker-compose.yml up -d <container-name>
Verify that all containers are up and running: you should see the 5 containers with a status Up.
sudo docker ps
Now you have an Astar zkEVM RPC node up and running on port 8545, you just have to wait for it to synchronize.
Using RPC
View container logs.
sudo docker logs -fn30 <container-name>
Test RPC requests.
# Get the chain Id
curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"id":1, "jsonrpc":"2.0", "method": "eth_chainId", "params": []}' http://localhost:8545
# Expected response
{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"result":"0x133e40"}
# Get the latest block
curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"id":1, "jsonrpc":"2.0", "method": "eth_getBlockByNumber", "params": ["latest", false]}' http://localhost:8545
Stop containers.
sudo docker compose --env-file $ZKEVM_DIR/.env -f $ZKEVM_DIR/docker-compose.yml down
Extra
Enable tracing
To enable tracing features (debug and txpool modules) on the RPC, add the following command to the zkevm-rpc container in the docker-compose file:
--http.api=eth,net,debug,zkevm,txpool,web3
Access from outside
To make a RPC endpoint URL available from outside, it is recommended to add a HTTP server. You can refer to this section to install an nginx server.