Quick Start Guide

Install

To install chia-blockchain, follow these install instructions according to your operating system. This software only supports 64 bit operating systems.

All configuration data is stored in a directory structure at the $CHIA_ROOT environment variable or at ~/.chia/testnet/. You can find databases, and logs there. Optionally, you can set $CHIA_ROOT to the .chia directory in your home directory with export CHIA_ROOT=~/.chia and if you add it to your .bashrc or .zshrc to it will remain set across logouts and reboots. If you set $CHIA_ROOT you will have to migrate configuration items by hand or unset the variable for chia init to work with unset CHIA_ROOT.

If you are using the MacOS or Windows builds, your keys are created during the first run. We recommend saving the mnemonic. You can start plotting a plot file using the Plot tab or the command line. This can take a long time depending on the size of the plots (the k variable). To be competitive on mainnet you will probably have to have a few k=32 or larger plots but a k=32 plot currently takes about 10 hours to plot on an M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD and requires 332 GiB of temporary working space to create a final plot file of 101.3 GiB. Your likelihood of winning a given plot is only driven by the final size of files.

Plots created with Beta 8 and newer version of the chia software will work on mainnet. The minimum plot size will be k=32.

If you want more peers and better network connectivity, you should also try opening port 8444 on your router so other peers can connect to you. Follow this guide but using port 8444 instead of 8333. This helps the network be more decentralized.

Windows

You can learn how to use the Graphical User Interface (GUI) in Beginners Guide.

You can start with the Command Line Interface (CLI) by checking the commands available in ~\AppData\Local\Chia-Blockchain\app-1.0.5\resources\app.asar.unpacked\daemon\. Try .\chia -h or .\chia plots -h for example:

1. Open PowerShell

   On start menu type "powershell" and press the enter key.

2. Change Directory cd

   On PowerShell type cd $env:localAPPDATA\Chia-Blockchain\app-1.0.5\resources\app.asar.unpacked\daemon\ and press the enter key.

3. Read Chia help

   On PowerShell type .\chia -h and press the enter key.

For more information you can check these Windows Tips & Tricks and read more about commands in general in CLI Commands Reference.

You can view your logs by opening ".chia\mainnet\log\debug.log" with a text editor like notepad or see it as it runs in PowerShell by using Get-Content, Get-Content ~\.chia\mainnet\log\debug.log -wait.

MacOS

There are commands available in /Applications/Chia.app/Contents/Resources/app.asar.unpacked/daemon Try ./chia -h or ./chia plots -h for example. You can view your debug.log as it runs in from Terminal, tail -f ~/.chia/mainnet/log/debug.log.

A handy trick is to add that directory to your path - export PATH=/Applications/Chia.app/Contents/Resources/app.asar.unpacked/daemon:$PATH. To make it persistent add the same line to your .bashrc or .zshrc

Linux

If you installed Chia with the linux installer files, your chia executable should be in one of the following locations:

/usr/lib/chia-blockchain/resources/app.asar.unpacked/daemon/chia

/lib/chia-blockchain/resources/app.asar.unpacked/daemon/chia

If you installed from source (using git), just activate and run chia directly.

Development/source builds

If you've installed via the installers you can skip these steps.

Remember that once you complete your install you must be in the Python virtual environment which you access from the chia-blockchain directory, or the Windows "Chia Blockchain" directory, or your home directory if you opted for a binary install. Enter the virtual environment with the command . ./activate. Both dots are critical and once executed correctly your cli prompt will look something like (venv) username@machine:~$ with (venv) prepended.

Use deactivate should you want to exit the venv. If you're not a fan of dots, an equivalent alternative on most platforms is source venv/bin/activate and you'll see that method in places in this documentation.

Migrate or set up configuration files

chia init

Generate keys

Create some keys by running the following script if you don't already have keys:

chia keys generate

Run a full node + farmer + harvester + wallet

To run a full node on port 8444, and connect to the mainnet, run the following command. Logs are usually at ~/.chia/mainnet/logs/debug.log or ~.chia\mainnet\logs\debug.log on Windows

sh install-gui.sh
cd chia-blockchain-gui
npm run electron &

Farmers are entities in the network who use their drive space to try to create blocks (like Bitcoin's miners), and earn block rewards.

You can use the command line tools and change the working directories and output directory for plotting, with the "-t" (temp), "-2" (second temp), and "-d" (destination) arguments to the chia plots create command. -n 2 will create two plots of type k=32 and take about 12 hours on NVMe drives in the example below.

chia plots create -k 32 -n 2
chia plots check -n 30

Note that in the dev build the commands are chia plots create and chia plots check.

Run a timelord

Note If you want to run a Timelord on Linux, see LINUX_TIMELORD.md. Information on blue boxes coming soon.

Timelords execute sequential verifiable delay functions (proofs of time or VDFs), that get added to blocks to make them valid. This requires fast CPUs and a few cores per VDF as well as completing the install steps above and running the following from the chia-blockchain directory:

. ./activate
sh install-timelord.sh
chia start timelord &

Alternatively run the local simulation

You can instead run the simulation, which runs all servers and multiple full nodes, locally. Note the the simulation is local only and requires installation of timelords and VDFs. The introducer will only know the local ips of the full nodes, so it cannot broadcast the correct ips to external peers. This should work on MacOS and Linux.

chia start sim

Tips

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS or newer, Amazon Linux 2, and CentOS 7.7 or newer are the easiest linux install environments.

UPnP is enabled by default to open port 8444 for incoming connections. If this causes issues, you can disable it in config.yaml. Some routers may require port forwarding, or enabling UPnP in the router's configuration.

RPC Interface

The Node has an RPC Interface with documentation.