Polygon deployment

This is a simplified ansible playbook to install Polygon mainnet/testnet, I decided to publish it because I found the Polygon docs a bit confusing and not up-to-date.

Initial considerations

1. This is to deploy a Full RPC Node, if you want to deploy a validator you'll need to do some more steps that are not covered here.

2. I deploy heimdall and bor under /polygon directory, if you want to use the default directories simply delete every line that has the variable polygon_node_home defined.

3. The playbook is fully idempotent.

Getting started

This playbook creates the bor and heimdall services under a user's systemd, so you'll only be able to interact with it using the polygon user.

e.g:

sudo su - polygon
systemctl --user status bor

All variables are set in the group_vars, below are a few steps to take into account before initiating the deploy:

1. Check if we're pulling the latest version of heimdall and bor, you can find the one that will be called in the heimdall_version and bor_version variables.

2. Replace the value of heimdall_eth_rpc_url to an Ethereum RPC node, heimdall needs to query it from time to time.

3. Set your mainnet and testnet nodes IPs under inventory/hosts

Deploying nodes

Run the following command: ansible-playbook playbook.yml -i inventory/hosts -K. It's going to install golang-go first and then start with polygon deployment, if you don't need the golang-go tasks just delete it from playbook.yml

Note: It'll deploy the mainnet and testnet nodes at the same time, you can deploy one at each time by appending -l mainnet/testnet to the command above.

Using tags

I've included some tags on roles/polygon/main.yml to make things easier when we need to update just one service or a set of tasks.

Say you've updated a parameter in the heimdalld.service and you just want to update it in the remote host, you can run: ansible-playbook playbook.yml -i inventory/hosts -K --tags heimdall_install

Post deploy

Now that you have your nodes deployed you'll need to download the network snapshot and unzip it inside the node's data directory.

You can find the snapshots here: https://snapshots.matic.today/

Note: You better download it in a tmux window + nohup or something similar for the mainnet ones, they're big.

Heimdall mainnet

1. cd /polygon/heimdall/data/
2. tmux new -s heimdall
3. nohup wget -O heimdall_snapshot.tar.gz SNAPSHOT_LINK.tar.gz > /dev/null
4. tar -zxvf heimdall_snapshot.tar.gz
5. Ctrl + b then hit d to detach.

Bor mainnet

1. cd /polygon/bor/data/bor/chaindata/
2. tmux new -s bor
3. nohup wget -O bor_snapshot.tar.gz SNAPSHOT_LINK.tar.gz > /dev/null (I generally use the pruned one)
4. tar -zxvf bor_snapshot.tar.gz
5. Ctrl + b then hit d to detach.

Follow the same steps for testnet.

IMPORTANT: Start your bor node ONLY when your heimdall has fully synced, if not it won't work.

To check if heimdall has caught up: curl -s "localhost:26657/status" | jq .result.sync_info.catching_up. It should show false when the node is fully synced.