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In other words, instead of attaching to the main network, you want to join the test network with your node, which is fully equivalent to the main network, but with play-Ether only. The console subcommand have the exact same meaning as above and they are equally useful on the testnet too. Please see above for their explanations if you've skipped to here.
Although there are some internal protective measures to prevent transactions from crossing over between the main network and test network, you should make sure to always use separate accounts for play-money and real-money.
Unless you manually move accounts, Geth will by default correctly separate the two networks and will not make any accounts available between them. The above test network is a cross client one based on the ethash proof-of-work consensus algorithm. Go Ethereum also supports connecting to a proof-of-authority based test network called Rinkeby operated by members of the community.
This network is lighter, more secure, but is only supported by go-ethereum. As an alternative to passing the numerous flags to the geth binary, you can also pass a configuration file via:. To get an idea how the file should look like you can use the dumpconfig subcommand to export your existing configuration:. This will start geth in fast-sync mode with a DB memory allowance of 1GB just as the above command does.
It will also create a persistent volume in your home directory for saving your blockchain as well as map the default ports. There is also an alpine tag available for a slim version of the image. Do not forget --rpcaddr 0. By default, geth binds to the local interface and RPC endpoints is not accessible from the outside.
As a developer, sooner rather than later you'll want to start interacting with Geth and the Ethereum network via your own programs and not manually through the console. You can reuse the same connection for multiple requests! Hackers on the internet are actively trying to subvert Ethereum nodes with exposed APIs! Further, all browser tabs can access locally running webservers, so malicious webpages could try to subvert locally available APIs! Maintaining your own private network is more involved as a lot of configurations taken for granted in the official networks need to be manually set up.
First, you'll need to create the genesis state of your networks, which all nodes need to be aware of and agree upon. This consists of a small JSON file e.
The above fields should be fine for most purposes, although we'd recommend changing the nonce to some random value so you prevent unknown remote nodes from being able to connect to you. If you'd like to pre-fund some accounts for easier testing, you can populate the alloc field with account configs:. With the genesis state defined in the above JSON file, you'll need to initialize every Geth node with it prior to starting it up to ensure all blockchain parameters are correctly set:.
The clean way is to configure and run a dedicated bootnode:. With the bootnode online, it will display an enode URL that other nodes can use to connect to it and exchange peer information.
Make sure to replace the displayed IP address information most probably [:: You could also use a full fledged Geth node as a bootnode, but it's the less recommended way. It will probably also be desirable to keep the data directory of your private network separated, so do also specify a custom --datadir flag.
Since your network will be completely cut off from the main and test networks, you'll also need to configure a miner to process transactions and create new blocks for you. For information on such a setup, please consult the EtherMining subreddit and the Genoil miner repository. In a private network setting however, a single CPU miner instance is more than enough for practical purposes as it can produce a stable stream of blocks at the correct intervals without needing heavy resources consider running on a single thread, no need for multiple ones either.
To start a Geth instance for mining, run it with all your usual flags, extended by:. Which will start mining blocks and transactions on a single CPU thread, crediting all proceedings to the account specified by --etherbase.
You can further tune the mining by changing the default gas limit blocks converge to --targetgaslimit and the price transactions are accepted at --gasprice. Thank you for considering to help out with the source code! We welcome contributions from anyone on the internet, and are grateful for even the smallest of fixes!
If you'd like to contribute to go-ethereum, please fork, fix, commit and send a pull request for the maintainers to review and merge into the main code base. Please see the Developers' Guide for more details on configuring your environment, managing project dependencies and testing procedures. The go-ethereum library i. The go-ethereum binaries i. Official golang implementation of the Ethereum protocol. Go Ethereum Official golang implementation of the Ethereum protocol.
Building the source For prerequisites and detailed build instructions please read the Installation Instructions on the wiki. Once the dependencies are installed, run make geth or, to build the full suite of utilities: It is the entry point into the Ethereum network main-, test- or private net , capable of running as a full node default archive node retaining all historical state or a light node retrieving data live.
If you'd like to pre-fund some accounts for easier testing, you can populate the alloc field with account configs:. With the genesis state defined in the above JSON file, you'll need to initialize every Geth node with it prior to starting it up to ensure all blockchain parameters are correctly set:. The clean way is to configure and run a dedicated bootnode:. With the bootnode online, it will display an enode URL that other nodes can use to connect to it and exchange peer information.
Make sure to replace the displayed IP address information most probably [:: You could also use a full fledged Geth node as a bootnode, but it's the less recommended way. It will probably also be desirable to keep the data directory of your private network separated, so do also specify a custom --datadir flag. Since your network will be completely cut off from the main and test networks, you'll also need to configure a miner to process transactions and create new blocks for you.
For information on such a setup, please consult the EtherMining subreddit and the Genoil miner repository. In a private network setting however, a single CPU miner instance is more than enough for practical purposes as it can produce a stable stream of blocks at the correct intervals without needing heavy resources consider running on a single thread, no need for multiple ones either. To start a Geth instance for mining, run it with all your usual flags, extended by:. Which will start mining blocks and transactions on a single CPU thread, crediting all proceedings to the account specified by --etherbase.
You can further tune the mining by changing the default gas limit blocks converge to --targetgaslimit and the price transactions are accepted at --gasprice. Thank you for considering to help out with the source code! We welcome contributions from anyone on the internet, and are grateful for even the smallest of fixes!
If you'd like to contribute to go-ethereum, please fork, fix, commit and send a pull request for the maintainers to review and merge into the main code base.
Please see the Developers' Guide for more details on configuring your environment, managing project dependencies and testing procedures. The go-ethereum library i. The go-ethereum binaries i. Official golang implementation of the Ethereum protocol.
Go Ethereum Official golang implementation of the Ethereum protocol. Building the source For prerequisites and detailed build instructions please read the Installation Instructions on the wiki. Once the dependencies are installed, run make geth or, to build the full suite of utilities: It is the entry point into the Ethereum network main-, test- or private net , capable of running as a full node default archive node retaining all historical state or a light node retrieving data live.
It operates on plain Ethereum contract ABIs with expanded functionality if the contract bytecode is also available. However it also accepts Solidity source files, making development much more streamlined. Please see our Native DApps wiki page for details.
It can be used as a lightweight bootstrap node to aid in finding peers in private networks. Its purpose is to allow isolated, fine-grained debugging of EVM opcodes e. Please see the test suite's readme for details. This is the entrypoint for the swarm network. Running geth Going through all the possible command line flags is out of scope here please consult our CLI Wiki page , but we've enumerated a few common parameter combos to get you up to speed quickly on how you can run your own Geth instance.
Full node on the main Ethereum network By far the most common scenario is people wanting to simply interact with the Ethereum network: Start geth in fast sync mode default, can be changed with the --syncmode flag , causing it to download more data in exchange for avoiding processing the entire history of the Ethereum network, which is very CPU intensive. Start up Geth's built-in interactive JavaScript console , via the trailing console subcommand through which you can invoke all official web3 methods as well as Geth's own management APIs.
This too is optional and if you leave it out you can always attach to an already running Geth instance with geth attach. Full node on the Ethereum test network Transitioning towards developers, if you'd like to play around with creating Ethereum contracts, you almost certainly would like to do that without any real money involved until you get the hang of the entire system.
Specifying the --testnet flag however will reconfigure your Geth instance a bit: Note, on OSX and Linux this also means that attaching to a running testnet node requires the use of a custom endpoint since geth attach will try to attach to a production node endpoint by default. Windows users are not affected by this. Instead of connecting the main Ethereum network, the client will connect to the test network, which uses different P2P bootnodes, different network IDs and genesis states.
Full node on the Rinkeby test network The above test network is a cross client one based on the ethash proof-of-work consensus algorithm. This works only with geth v1. Docker quick start One of the quickest ways to get Ethereum up and running on your machine is by using Docker: Programatically interfacing Geth nodes As a developer, sooner rather than later you'll want to start interacting with Geth and the Ethereum network via your own programs and not manually through the console.
Operating a private network Maintaining your own private network is more involved as a lot of configurations taken for granted in the official networks need to be manually set up. Defining the private genesis state First, you'll need to create the genesis state of your networks, which all nodes need to be aware of and agree upon.