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Run a validator

Introduction

This guide will walk you through the process of setting up a new validator on Liberland Chain.

You can follow along a video here

Note:

  • DO NOT expose your validators RPC ports (9933 and 9944 by default) publicly on the internet. Treat validators with more care than full nodes.
  • You do not need to a run a validator to earn LLD staking rewards. As a user you can simply become a nominator and stake your coins without needing to run a validator.

Requirements

Claim on-chain citizenship

  • You will need your LLD, LLM, and an onchain citizenship to proceed. Follow the Claim citizenship steps to proceed.
  • At the end of this process, you should have a wallet, and a funded citizen account on the mainnet. Log into blockchain.liberland.org with your liberland account to verify everything works so far.

Recommended servers

If self hosting is not practical, the up-to-date current order of recommended virtual server providers are

Option 1: AWS Lightsail

Go to AWS and create an account.

  • In search, type lightsail
  • Under Instances, click Create instance
  • Select Linux/Unix, OS Only, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, scroll down and select the $10 plan with 2 GB RAM, 1 vCPU and 60gb SSD
  • Scroll down and click on "Create instance"
  • Wait for a few minutes for a server to initialize
  • Click on the console icon on your instance to open a in-browser console
  • Follow the installation steps of this guide

Option 2: Digital Ocean

Set up a digital ocean server

Installation

Option 1: automatic script

This script is for Ubuntu and Debian servers. If you're not running Ubuntu or Debian, please contact dev team - they can add support for your distribution.

Run the following command on your server:

curl -sSLO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liberland/liberland_substrate/main/scripts/install/install.sh
bash install.sh

The script will ask you for confirmation before every action. It will:

  • install dependencies

  • download liberland node and chain specification

  • setup a systemd service, so that the node starts automatically

  • configure time synchronization

  • generate session keys for use in next step

  • The script gives the node time to start up, if it takes too long it will exit. If that happens, just wait a minute and run the script again.

  • If everything goes OK, you will see something like this:

Your node is now running. Useful commands:
	Check status: sudo systemctl status liberland-validator
	Stop: sudo systemctl stop liberland-validator
	Start: sudo systemctl start liberland-validator
	Logs: sudo journalctl -u liberland-validator
Node data is stored in /opt/liberland/data.
Session keys for your node: [long text starting with 0x here]

  • Copy the session keys, you will need them when adding validator.

  • If something went wrong and you need to get session keys manually, see Regenerating session keys.

Option 2: using docker

See Docker guide.

Option 3: manually using prebuilt binaries

See Using prebuilt binary

Option 4: using source

See Using source

Wait for your node to sync

Monitor logs of your node.

While syncing, you will see Syncing messages and lots of maybe_release ran all the way messages.

When synced, maybe_release ran all the way will mostly disappear and you will see mostly Idle and Imported messages.

This process will take a few seconds for every day the blockchain has been running - so on old blockchains it may take hours.

Add validator

Note that in order to do this step you will need some LLD, so ask someone to give you some if you dont already have it.

  1. Visit Staking Accounts on Polkadot.js Apps:
  2. Click "+ Validator" button.
  3. Set your stash and controller accounts and select how much LLD you want to bond.
  4. Click "Next" button.
  5. Paste the session keys you got from installation step to Keys from rotateKeys form.
  6. Click "Bond & Validate"

Verify

Immediately after adding validator, you should see it as "Waiting":

  1. Visit Staking Accounts on Polkadot.js Apps:
  2. Click "Waiting" button.
  3. You should see your Stash account in the "Intentions" table.

Now you have to wait to see if it gets elected to current set of validators. You may need to wait until new era starts and then the chance of being elected is based on the amount of staked LLD. To see current set of validators:

  1. Visit Staking Accounts on Polkadot.js Apps:
  2. Click "All validators" button.
  3. Click "Active" button.
  4. You should see list of active validators in the "Validators" table.

Optional: add nominators

Once your validator is up and running and you have a solid track record of no downtime you can ask other LLD holders to nominate your validator node.