Grid Deployment on a Full VM

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Prerequisites
• DNS Settings
  • DNS Verification
• Prepare the VM
• Set the Firewall
• Launch the Script
• Access the Grid Services
• Manual Commands
• Update the Deployment

Introduction

We present the steps to deploy a network instance of the TFGrid on a full VM.

For this guide, we will be deploying a mainnet instance. While the steps are similar for testnet and devnet, you will have to adjust your deployment depending on which network you use.

Prerequisites

For this guide, you will need to deploy a full VM on the ThreeFold Grid with at least the following minimum specs:

• IPv4
• IPv6
• 32GB of RAM
• 1000 GB of SSD
• 8 vcores

After deploying the full VM, take note of the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to properly set the DNS records and then SSH into the VM.

DNS Settings

You need to set an A record for the IPv4 address and an AAAA record for the IPv6 address with a wildcard subdomain.

The following table explicitly shows how to set the A and AAAA records for your domain.

DNS Verification

You can use tools such as DNSChecker or dig on a terminal to check if the DNS propagadation is complete.

Prepare the VM

• Download the ThreeFold Tech grid_deployment repository

  git clone https://github.com/threefoldtech/grid_deployment
  cd grid_deployment/docker-compose/mainnet
  

• Generate a TFChain node key with subkey

  echo .subkey_mainnet >> .gitignore
  ../subkey generate-node-key > .nodekey_mainnet
  cat .nodekey_mainnet
  

• Create and the set environment variables file

  cp .secrets.env-example .secrets.env
  

• Adjust the environment file

  nano .secrets.env
  

• To adjust the .secrets.env file, take into account the following:
  • DOMAIN="example.com"
    • Write your own domain
  • TFCHAIN_NODE_KEY="abc123"
    • Write the output of the command cat .nodekey_mainnet
  • ACTIVATION_SERVICE_MNEMONIC="word1 word2 ... word24"
    • Write the seed phrase of an account on mainnet with at least 10 TFT in the wallet
  • GRID_PROXY_MNEMONIC="word1 word2 ... word24"
    • Write the seed phrase of an account on mainnet with at least 10 TFT in the wallet and a registered twin ID*

*Note: If you've created an account using the ThreeFold Dashboard on mainnet, the twin ID is automatically registered.

Set the Firewall

You can use UFW to set the firewall:

ufw allow 80/tcp
ufw allow 443/tcp
ufw allow 30333/tcp
ufw allow 22/tcp
ufw enable
ufw status

Launch the Script

Once you've prepared the VM, you can simply run the script to install the grid stack and deploy it online.

sh install_grid_bknd.sh

This will take some time since you are downloading the whole mainnet grid snapshots.

Access the Grid Services

Once you've deployed the grid stack online, you can access the different grid services by usual the usual subdomains:

dashboard.your.domain
metrics.your.domain
tfchain.your.domain
graphql.your.domain
relay.your.domain
gridproxy.your.domain
activation.your.domain
stats.your.domain

Manual Commands

Once you've run the install script, you can deploy manually the grid stack with the following command:

docker compose --env-file .secrets.env --env-file .env up -d

You can also check if the environment variables are properly set:

docker compose --env-file .secrets.env --env-file .env config

If you want to see the output during deployment, remove -d in the command above as follows:

docker compose --env-file .secrets.env --env-file .env up

This can be helpful to troubleshoot errors.

Update the Deployment

Go into the folder of the proper network, e.g. mainnet, and run the following commands:

git pull -r
docker compose --env-file .secrets.env --env-file .env up -d