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Run a Celo node

This guide is designed to help node operators run a Celo L2 node. If you want to switch from running a Celo L1 node to a Celo L2 node, please see the migration guide.

To simplify running L2 nodes, Celo has created the celo-l2-node-docker-compose repo with all the necessary configuration files and docker compose templates, which make it easy to pull network configuration files and launch all the services needed to run an L2 node.

For node operators interested in using Kubernetes, we recommend using Kompose to convert the docker compose template to Kubernetes helm charts.

note

This guide only covers L2 Celo. Currently only the Alfajores testnet has been migrated to become a L2, other networks will not work with this guide.

Snap sync​

  1. Pull the latest version of celo-l2-node-docker-compose and cd into the root of the project.
  2. Run cp <network>.env .env where <network> is one of alfajores, baklava, or mainnet.
  3. Open .env and optionally configure any setting you may wish to change, such as setting NODE_TYPE=archive to enable archive mode.
  4. Run docker-compose up -d --build.
  5. To check the progress of the node you can run docker-compose logs -n 50 -f op-geth. This will display the last 50 lines of the logs and follow the logs as they are written. In a syncing node, you would expect to see lines of the form Syncing beacon headers downloaded=... where the downloaded number is increasing and later lines such as "Syncing: chain download in progress","synced":"21.07%" where the percentage is increasing. Once the percentage reaches 100%, the node should be synced.
  6. At this point, you should be able to validate the progression of the node by fetching the current block number via the RPC API and seeing that it is increasing. (Note that until fully synced, the RPC API will return 0 for the head block number).