Go Ethereum

A "swiss army knife" distribution of go-ethereum, with support for many species of Ethereum networks.

Binary archives are published at https://github.com/multi-geth/multi-geth/releases.

Upstream development from ethereum/go-ethereum is merged to this repository regularly, usually at every upstream tagged release. Every effort is made to maintain seamless compatibility with upstream source, including compatible RPC, JS, and CLI APIs, data storage locations and schemas, and, of course, interoperable client protocols. Applicable bug reports, bug fixes, features, and proposals should be made upstream whenever possible.

Network/client comparison

Networks supported by the respective go-ethereum packaged geth client.

Ticker	Network/Client	multi-geth	ethereumclassic/go-ethereum	ethereum/go-ethereum
ETH	Ethereum (Foundation)	✔️		✔️
ETC	Ethereum Classic	✔️	✔️
ETSC	Ethereum Social	✔️
ESN	EtherSocial	✔️
MIX	Mix	✔️
EXP	Expanse
ELLA	Ellaism	🚫1
MUSIC	Musicoin
	Morden (Geth+Parity ETH PoW Testnet)		✔️
	Ropsten (Geth+Parity ETH PoW Testnet)	✔️		✔️
	Rinkeby (Geth-only ETH PoA Testnet)	✔️		✔️
	Goerli (Geth+Parity ETH PoA Testnet)	✔️		✔️
	Kotti (Geth+Parity ETC PoA Testnet)	✔️
	Kovan (Parity-only ETH PoA Testnet)
	Tobalaba (EWF Testnet)
	Ephemeral development PoA network	✔️
	Private chains	✔️	✔️	✔️

1: This is originally an Ellaism Project. However, A recent hard fork makes Ellaism not feasible to support with go-ethereum any more. Existing Ellaism users are asked to switch to Parity.

Managing versions

Since this is a downstream fork of ethereum/go-ethereum, you'll want to maintain the go import path and git remotes accordingly. This repository should occupy $GOPATH/src/github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum, and you can optionally use git to set this fork as a default upstream remote. On Linux or Mac, this can be accomplished by the following or similar.

For a fresh install, the below. This will set multi-geth/multi-geth as as the git remote origin by default.

$ env path=$GOPATH/src/github.com/ethereum mkdir -p $path && cd $path
$ git clone https://github.com/multi-geth/multi-geth.git go-ethereum && cd go-ethereum

Or, with an existing copy of the ethereum/go-ethereum source, the below. This will set multi-geth/multi-geth as the git remote multi-geth, and set the local branch master to track this repository's master branch.

$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum
$ git remote add multi-geth https://github.com/multi-geth/multi-geth.git
$ git fetch multi-geth
$ git checkout -B master -t multi-geth/master

ℹ️ Note that these instructions assume a traditional use of GOPATH-based Go project organization. Because of the way the make command works for this project (using a "GOPATH/work dir" pattern for building) you don't have to follow tradition to build; cloning this repo anywhere in your filesystem should be adequate.

Building the source

For prerequisites and detailed build instructions please read the Installation Instructions on the wiki.

Building geth requires both a Go (version 1.10 or later) and a C compiler. You can install them using your favourite package manager. Once the dependencies are installed, run

make geth

or, to build the full suite of utilities:

make all

Executables

The go-ethereum project comes with several wrappers/executables found in the cmd directory.

Command	Description
geth	Our main Ethereum CLI client. It is the entry point into the Ethereum network (main-, test- or private net), capable of running as a full node (default), archive node (retaining all historical state) or a light node (retrieving data live). It can be used by other processes as a gateway into the Ethereum network via JSON RPC endpoints exposed on top of HTTP, WebSocket and/or IPC transports. geth --help and the CLI Wiki page for command line options.
abigen	Source code generator to convert Ethereum contract definitions into easy to use, compile-time type-safe Go packages. It operates on plain Ethereum contract ABIs with expanded functionality if the contract bytecode is also available. However, it also accepts Solidity source files, making development much more streamlined. Please see our Native DApps wiki page for details.
bootnode	Stripped down version of our Ethereum client implementation that only takes part in the network node discovery protocol, but does not run any of the higher level application protocols. It can be used as a lightweight bootstrap node to aid in finding peers in private networks.
evm	Developer utility version of the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) that is capable of running bytecode snippets within a configurable environment and execution mode. Its purpose is to allow isolated, fine-grained debugging of EVM opcodes (e.g. evm --code 60ff60ff --debug).
gethrpctest	Developer utility tool to support our ethereum/rpc-test test suite which validates baseline conformity to the Ethereum JSON RPC specs. Please see the test suite's readme for details.
rlpdump	Developer utility tool to convert binary RLP (Recursive Length Prefix) dumps (data encoding used by the Ethereum protocol both network as well as consensus wise) to user-friendlier hierarchical representation (e.g. rlpdump --hex CE0183FFFFFFC4C304050583616263).
swarm	Swarm daemon and tools. This is the entry point for the Swarm network. swarm --help for command line options and subcommands. See Swarm README for more information.
puppeth	a CLI wizard that aids in creating a new Ethereum network.

Running geth

Going through all the possible command line flags is out of scope here (please consult our CLI Wiki page), but we've enumerated a few common parameter combos to get you up to speed quickly on how you can run your own Geth instance.

Fast node on an Ethereum network

By far the most common scenario is people wanting to simply interact with an Ethereum network: create accounts; transfer funds; deploy and interact with contracts. For this particular use-case the user doesn't care about years-old historical data, so we can fast-sync quickly to the current state of the network. To do so:

$ geth [|--classic|--social|--ethersocial|--testnet|--rinkeby|--kotti|--goerli] console

This command will:

• Start geth in fast sync mode (default, can be changed with the --syncmode flag), causing it to download more data in exchange for avoiding processing the entire history of the Ethereum network, which is very CPU intensive.
• Start up Geth's built-in interactive JavaScript console, (via the trailing console subcommand) through which you can invoke all official web3 methods as well as Geth's own management APIs. This tool is optional and if you leave it out you can always attach to an already running Geth instance with geth attach.

  To keep the shell clear of event logs while interacting with the JS console, you can append 2> stderr.log, which will redirect the normal stderr log lines to a file for later reference, while keeping the console and it's output (on stdout) visible in the shell.

Full archive node on an Ethereum network

$ geth [|--<chain>] --syncmode=full --gcmode=archive

This command will start geth in a full archive mode, causing it to download, process, and store the entirety of available chain data.

Configuration

As an alternative to passing the numerous flags to the geth binary, you can also pass a configuration file via:

$ geth --config /path/to/your_config.toml

To get an idea how the file should look like you can use the dumpconfig subcommand to export your existing configuration:

$ geth --your-favourite-flags dumpconfig

Note: This works only with geth v1.6.0 and above.

Docker quick start

One of the quickest ways to get Ethereum up and running on your machine is by using Docker:

docker run -d --name ethereum-node -v /Users/alice/.ethereum:/root \
           -p 8545:8545 -p 30303:30303 \
           ethereum/client-go

This will start geth in fast-sync mode with a DB memory allowance of 1GB just as the above command does. It will also create a persistent volume in your home directory for saving your blockchain as well as map the default ports. There is also an alpine tag available for a slim version of the image.

Do not forget --rpcaddr 0.0.0.0, if you want to access RPC from other containers and/or hosts. By default, geth binds to the local interface and RPC endpoints is not accessible from the outside.

Programmatically interfacing Geth nodes

As a developer, sooner rather than later you'll want to start interacting with Geth and the Ethereum network via your own programs and not manually through the console. To aid this, Geth has built-in support for a JSON-RPC based APIs (standard APIs and Geth specific APIs). These can be exposed via HTTP, WebSockets and IPC (UNIX sockets on UNIX based platforms, and named pipes on Windows).

The IPC interface is enabled by default and exposes all the APIs supported by Geth, whereas the HTTP and WS interfaces need to manually be enabled and only expose a subset of APIs due to security reasons. These can be turned on/off and configured as you'd expect.

HTTP based JSON-RPC API options:

• --rpc Enable the HTTP-RPC server
• --rpcaddr HTTP-RPC server listening interface (default: "localhost")
• --rpcport HTTP-RPC server listening port (default: 8545)
• --rpcapi API's offered over the HTTP-RPC interface (default: "eth,net,web3")
• --rpccorsdomain Comma separated list of domains from which to accept cross origin requests (browser enforced)
• --ws Enable the WS-RPC server
• --wsaddr WS-RPC server listening interface (default: "localhost")
• --wsport WS-RPC server listening port (default: 8546)
• --wsapi API's offered over the WS-RPC interface (default: "eth,net,web3")
• --wsorigins Origins from which to accept websockets requests
• --ipcdisable Disable the IPC-RPC server
• --ipcapi API's offered over the IPC-RPC interface (default: "admin,debug,eth,miner,net,personal,shh,txpool,web3")
• --ipcpath Filename for IPC socket/pipe within the datadir (explicit paths escape it)

You'll need to use your own programming environments' capabilities (libraries, tools, etc) to connect via HTTP, WS or IPC to a Geth node configured with the above flags and you'll need to speak JSON-RPC on all transports. You can reuse the same connection for multiple requests!

Note: Please understand the security implications of opening up an HTTP/WS based transport before doing so! Hackers on the internet are actively trying to subvert Ethereum nodes with exposed APIs! Further, all browser tabs can access locally running web servers, so malicious web pages could try to subvert locally available APIs!

OpenRPC Discovery

MultiGeth supports OpenRPC's Service Discovery method, enabling efficient and well-spec'd JSON RPC interfacing and tooling. This method follows the established JSON RPC patterns, and is accessible via HTTP, WebSocket, IPC, and console servers. To use this method:

$ curl -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' --data '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"rpc.discover","params":[],"id":1}'
{                                                                                                                                                         
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",                                                                                                                                       
  "id": 1,                                                                                                                                                
  "result": {                                                                                                                                             
    "openrpc": "1.0.0",                                                                                                                                   
    "info": {                                                                                                                                             
      "description": "This API lets you interact with an EVM-based client via JSON-RPC",                                                                  
      "license": {                                                                                                                                        
        "name": "Apache 2.0",                                                                                                                             
        "url": "https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html"                                                                                         
      },                                                                                                                                                  
      "title": "Ethereum JSON-RPC",                                                                                                                       
      "version": "1.0.0"                                                                                                                                  
    },                                                                                                                                                    
    "servers": null,                                                                                                                                      
    "methods": [                                                                                                                                          
      {                                                                                                                                                   
        "description": "Returns the version of the current client",                                                                                       
        "name": "web3_clientVersion",                                                                                                                     
        "params": [],                                                                                                                                     
        "result": {                                                                                                                                       
          "description": "client version",                                                                                                                
          "name": "clientVersion",                                                                                                                        
          "schema": {                                                                                                                                     
            "type": "string"                                                                                                                              
          }                                                                                                                                               
        },                                                                                                                                                
        "summary": "current client version"                                                                                                               
      },                      

[...]

Operating a private network

Maintaining your own private network is more involved as a lot of configurations taken for granted in the official networks need to be manually set up.

Defining the private genesis state

First, you'll need to create the genesis state of your networks, which all nodes need to be aware of and agree upon. This consists of a small JSON file (e.g. call it genesis.json):

{
  "config": {
        "chainId": 0,
        "homesteadBlock": 0,
        "eip155Block": 0,
        "eip158Block": 0
    },
  "alloc"      : {},
  "coinbase"   : "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000",
  "difficulty" : "0x20000",
  "extraData"  : "",
  "gasLimit"   : "0x2fefd8",
  "nonce"      : "0x0000000000000042",
  "mixhash"    : "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000",
  "parentHash" : "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000",
  "timestamp"  : "0x00"
}

The above fields should be fine for most purposes, although we'd recommend changing the nonce to some random value so you prevent unknown remote nodes from being able to connect to you. If you'd like to pre-fund some accounts for easier testing, you can populate the alloc field with account configs:

"alloc": {
  "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000001": {"balance": "111111111"},
  "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000002": {"balance": "222222222"}
}

With the genesis state defined in the above JSON file, you'll need to initialize every Geth node with it prior to starting it up to ensure all blockchain parameters are correctly set:

$ geth init path/to/genesis.json

Creating the rendezvous point

With all nodes that you want to run initialized to the desired genesis state, you'll need to start a bootstrap node that others can use to find each other in your network and/or over the internet. The clean way is to configure and run a dedicated bootnode:

$ bootnode --genkey=boot.key
$ bootnode --nodekey=boot.key

With the bootnode online, it will display an enode URL that other nodes can use to connect to it and exchange peer information. Make sure to replace the displayed IP address information (most probably [::]) with your externally accessible IP to get the actual enode URL.

Note: You could also use a full-fledged Geth node as a bootnode, but it's the less recommended way.

Starting up your member nodes

With the bootnode operational and externally reachable (you can try telnet <ip> <port> to ensure it's indeed reachable), start every subsequent Geth node pointed to the bootnode for peer discovery via the --bootnodes flag. It will probably also be desirable to keep the data directory of your private network separated, so do also specify a custom --datadir flag.

$ geth --datadir=path/to/custom/data/folder --bootnodes=<bootnode-enode-url-from-above>

Note: Since your network will be completely cut off from the main and test networks, you'll also need to configure a miner to process transactions and create new blocks for you.

Running a private miner

Mining on the public Ethereum network is a complex task as it's only feasible using GPUs, requiring an OpenCL or CUDA enabled ethminer instance. For information on such a setup, please consult the EtherMining subreddit and the Genoil miner repository.

In a private network setting, however a single CPU miner instance is more than enough for practical purposes as it can produce a stable stream of blocks at the correct intervals without needing heavy resources (consider running on a single thread, no need for multiple ones either). To start a Geth instance for mining, run it with all your usual flags, extended by:

$ geth <usual-flags> --mine --minerthreads=1 --etherbase=0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Which will start mining blocks and transactions on a single CPU thread, crediting all proceedings to the account specified by --etherbase. You can further tune the mining by changing the default gas limit blocks converge to (--targetgaslimit) and the price transactions are accepted at (--gasprice).

Contribution

Thank you for considering to help out with the source code! We welcome contributions from anyone on the internet, and are grateful for even the smallest of fixes!

If you'd like to contribute to go-ethereum, please fork, fix, commit and send a pull request for the maintainers to review and merge into the main code base. If you wish to submit more complex changes though, please check up with the core devs first on our gitter channel to ensure those changes are in line with the general philosophy of the project and/or get some early feedback which can make both your efforts much lighter as well as our review and merge procedures quick and simple.

Please make sure your contributions adhere to our coding guidelines:

• Code must adhere to the official Go formatting guidelines (i.e. uses gofmt).
• Code must be documented adhering to the official Go commentary guidelines.
• Pull requests need to be based on and opened against the master branch.
• Commit messages should be prefixed with the package(s) they modify.
  • E.g. "eth, rpc: make trace configs optional"

Please see the Developers' Guide for more details on configuring your environment, managing project dependencies, and testing procedures.

License

The go-ethereum library (i.e. all code outside of the cmd directory) is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0, also included in our repository in the COPYING.LESSER file.

The go-ethereum binaries (i.e. all code inside of the cmd directory) is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0, also included in our repository in the COPYING file.