Creating a Bananode

What are we trying to do here?

I've found that there's not a whole lot of Banano-specific information available when it comes to creating a node. In this article, I'm going to outline the method that I used to successfully create a Banano Node (Bananode) on the Ubuntu flavor of Linux, specifically Ubuntu 21.04. The source for most of everything below is based on what I could find regarding creating a Nano node; since Banano is a fork of Nano, there's a lot of stuff that's applicable between both of the coins. However, if you've ever tried setting up a Bananode yourself using the Nano node documentation, you've learned that there are a lot of differences.

Let's get started

Step 1. Get an Ubuntu Server or VPS

First off, you'll need a VPS (such as from Digital Ocean, Amazon, Vultr, etc.) with Ubuntu 21.04 installed. Other versions of Ubuntu may work, as well, but your mileage may vary.

Step 2. Make sure you've got all the necessary dependencies installed

Run the following on your Ubuntu box:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl software-properties-common gnupg lsb-release hashalot qrencode

Depending on what you want to do after installing the node, you might need more that what's included here, but this will be enough to get you started.

Step 3. Install Docker

There are a lots of different ways to get Docker installed and running, but this is what I've found to be the most straightforward:

curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg

echo "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io

Step 4. Install and Run the Banano Node Container

docker run --restart=unless-stopped -d \
  -p 7071:7071 \
  -p [::1]:7072:7072 \
  -p [::1]:7074:7074 \
  -v ~:/root \
  --name bananode \
  bananocoin/banano:latest

Step 5. Confirm that the node is running

docker ps

Once you run the above command, you should see the the Bananode running with it's own Container ID. Thankfully, we've already binded the container its own name (bananode), so we don't need to do anything with that Container ID, except see that it's running.

Step 5. Enjoy your new Bananode!

Here are some commands you might find useful:

Stop your Banano Node:

sudo docker stop bananode

Start your Banano Node:

sudo docker start bananode

Just updated your config files? Restart your Banano Node:

sudo docker restart bananode

Next up

Now that you've got your Bananode installed, you'll want to use it! Next up (to be written shortly) will be how to Enable RPC and use RPC commands with your new Bananode to do some nifty stuff. Until then, feel free to explore the documentation available for Nano and see if you can get things working on your own.