Installing Cardano-node

Installing the node from source
The latest version of the node may be downloaded from the cardano-node GitHub Releases page.
Prerequisites
To set up your platform, you will need:
Network
CPU Cores
Free RAM
Free storage
OS for Pasive Node
OS for Stake pool
Mainnet
2
16GB
75GB of free storage (100GB recommended for future growth
Linux / Windows** / MacOS
Linux
Preproduction
2
4GB
20GB
Linux / Windows** / MacOS
Linux
Preview
2
4GB
20GB
Linux / Windows** / MacOS
Linux
**Note If you are building on Windows, we recommend using WSL2 under Windows 10 as this provides a development and execution environment that is very similar to Ubuntu.
Installation dependencies
To download the source code and build it, you need the following packages and tools on your Linux system:
the version control system git,
the gcc C-compiler,
C++ support for gcc,
developer libraries for the arbitrary precision library gmp,
developer libraries for the compression library zlib,
developer libraries for systemd,
developer libraries for ncurses,
ncurses compatibility libraries,
the Haskell build tool cabal,
the GHC Haskell compiler (version 8.10.7 or above).
In Redhat, Fedora, and Centos:
sudo yum update -y
sudo yum install git gcc gcc-c++ tmux gmp-devel make tar xz wget zlib-devel libtool autoconf -y
sudo install systemd-devel ncurses-devel ncurses-compat-libs which jq openssl-devel lmdb-devel -y
For Debian/Ubuntu, use the following instead:
sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install automake build-essential pkg-config libffi-dev libgmp-dev libssl-dev libtinfo-dev libsystemd-dev zlib1g-dev make g++ tmux git jq wget libncursesw5 libtool autoconf liblmdb-dev -y
If you are using a different flavor of Linux, you will need to use the correct package manager for your platform instead of yum or apt-get, and the names of the packages you need to install might differ. On MacOSX, use the Homebrew (brew) installer.
Installing the Haskell environment
The recommended way to install the Haskell tools is via GHCup. Its installation script will guide you through the installation, and warn you about packages that you have to make sure are installed in the system (the ones described on the step above). Check this page for further explanation on the installation process.
Once GHCup is installed, open a new terminal (to get an updated environment) and run:
ghcup install ghc 8.10.7
ghcup install cabal 3.6.2.0
ghcup set ghc 8.10.7
ghcup set cabal 3.6.2.0
Alternatively, with ghcup tui you can pick the specific versions of the tools that you want to install, in particular you should have installed and set:
cabal >= 3.6.2.0
GHC >= 8.10.7
To check that you will use the GHCup tools (and not any other installation on the system), you can execute
which cabal
and it should return a path of this shape: /home/<user>/.ghcup/bin/cabal.
Installing Libsodium
Cardano uses a custom fork of libsodium which exposes some internal functions and adds some other new functions. This fork lives in https://github.com/input-output-hk/libsodium. Users can choose to either install that custom version of libsodium or otherwise tell cabal to use a ported version included in Cardano crypto libraries.
The C code is merely a port of the bits missing in a normal libsodium installation, so it should be as performant as installing the custom libsodium fork.
Installing the custom libsodium
Create a working directory for your builds:
mkdir -p ~/src
cd ~/src
Download and install libsodium:
git clone https://github.com/input-output-hk/libsodium
cd libsodium
git checkout 66f017f1
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install
Add the following to your ~/.bashrc file and source it (or re-open the terminal):
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH"
Using the ported c code
In order to avoid having to install the custom version, cardano-crypto-praos defines a cabal flag that makes use of C code located here. To enable this code, one has to add the following code in the cabal.project.local file:
package cardano-crypto-praos
  flags: -external-libsodium-vrf
For this to work, libsodium has to be in the system. For Ubuntu, this is achieved by:
sudo apt install libsodium-dev
Installing Secp256k1
Create a working directory for your builds:
mkdir -p ~/src
cd ~/src
Download and install libsecp256k1:
git clone https://github.com/bitcoin-core/secp256k1
cd secp256k1
git checkout ac83be33
./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-module-schnorrsig --enable-experimental
make
sudo make install
Downloading the source code for cardano-node
Create a working directory for your builds:
mkdir -p ~/src
cd ~/src
Download the Cardano node sources:
git clone https://github.com/input-output-hk/cardano-node.git
Change the working directory to the downloaded source code folder:
cd cardano-node
Check out the latest version of cardano-node (choose the tag with the highest version number: TAGGED-VERSION):
git fetch --all --recurse-submodules --tags
git tag
git checkout tags/<TAGGED VERSION>
Configuring the build options
We explicitly use the GHC version that we installed earlier. This avoids defaulting to a system version of GHC that might be different than the one you have installed.
echo "with-compiler: ghc-8.10.7" >> cabal.project.local
Building and installing the node
Build the node and CLI with cabal:
cabal build all
Install the newly built node and CLI commands to the ~/.local/bin directory:
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
cp -p "$(./scripts/bin-path.sh cardano-node)" ~/.local/bin/
cp -p "$(./scripts/bin-path.sh cardano-cli)" ~/.local/bin/
Note: ~/.local/bin should be in the $PATH.
Note, we avoid using cabal install because that method prevents the installed binaries from reporting the git revision with the --version switch.
Check the version that has been installed:
cardano-cli --version
Repeat the above process when you need to update to a new version.
Note: It might be necessary to delete the db-folder (the database-folder) before running an updated version of the node.
QUESTIONS AND FEEDBACK
If you have any questions and suggestions while taking the lessons please feel free to ask in the forum and we will respond as soon as possible.
Network	CPU Cores	Free RAM	Free storage	OS for Pasive Node	OS for Stake pool
Mainnet	2	16GB	75GB of free storage (100GB recommended for future growth	Linux / Windows** / MacOS	Linux
Preproduction	2	4GB	20GB	Linux / Windows** / MacOS	Linux
Preview	2	4GB	20GB	Linux / Windows** / MacOS	Linux
Last modified 2mo ago