grin/doc/build.md

Grin - Build, Configuration, and Running

Supported Platforms

Longer term, most platforms will likely be supported to some extent. Grin's programming language rust has build targets for most platforms.

What's working so far?

• Linux x86_64 and MacOS [grin + mining + development]
• Not Windows 10 yet [grin kind-of builds. No mining yet. Help wanted!]

Requirements

• rust 1.26+ (use rustup- i.e. curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh; source $HOME/.cargo/env)
  • if rust is already installed, you can simply update version with rustup update
• clang
• ncurses and libs (ncurses, ncursesw5)
• zlib libs (zlib1g-dev or zlib-devel)
• pkg-config
• libssl-dev
• linux-headers (reported needed on Alpine linux)

For Debian-based distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc), all in one line (except Rust):

apt install build-essential cmake git libgit2-dev clang libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev zlib1g-dev pkg-config libssl-dev

Build steps

git clone https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin.git
cd grin
cargo build --release

Grin can also be built in debug mode (without the --release flag, but using the --debug or the --verbose flag) but this will render fast sync prohibitively slow due to the large overhead of cryptographic operations.

Mining in Grin

Please note that all mining functions for Grin have moved into a separate, standalone package called grin_miner. Once your Grin code node is up and running, you can start mining by building and running grin-miner against your running Grin node.

Build errors

See Troubleshooting

What was built?

A successful build gets you:

• target/release/grin - the main grin binary

All data, configuration and log files created and used by grin are located in the hidden ~/.grin directory (under your user home directory) by default. You can modify all configuration values by editing the file ~/.grin/grin-server.toml.

It is also possible to have grin create its data files in the current directory. To do this, run

grin server config

Which will generate a grin-server.toml file in the current directory, pre-configured to use the current directory for all of its data. Running grin from a directory that contains a grin-server.toml file will use the values in that file instead of the default ~/.grin/grin-server.toml.

While testing, put the grin binary on your path like this:

export PATH=/path/to/grin/dir/target/debug:$PATH

Where path/to/grin/dir is your absolute path to the root directory of your Grin installation.

You can then run grin directly (try grin help for more options).

Configuration

Grin attempts to run with sensible defaults, and can be further configured via the grin-server.toml file. This file is generated by grin on its first run, and contains documentation on each available option.

While it's recommended that you perform all grin server configuration via grin-server.toml, it's also possible to supply command line switches to grin that override any settings in the file.

For help on grin commands and their switches, try:

grin help
grin wallet help
grin client help

Using grin

The wiki page How to use grin and linked pages have more information on what features we have, troubleshooting, etc.

Docker

    # Build using all available cores
    docker build -t grin .

    # run in foreground
    docker run -it -v grin:/usr/src/grin grin

    # or in background
    docker run -it -d -v grin:/usr/src/grin grin

If you decide to use a persistent storage (e.g. -v grin:/usr/src/grin) you will need grin-server.toml configuration file in it.

Cross-platform builds

Rust (cargo) can build grin for many platforms, so in theory running grin as a validating node on your low powered device might be possible. To cross-compile grin on a x86 Linux platform and produce ARM binaries, say, for a Raspberry Pi.