ethereum.org Build Your Own Blockchain How to Create a Private Ethereum Blockchain from Ground-up? GBD ravine ( ey, Oct 19, 2017-12 minread Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts, applications that run exactly as programmed without possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference. In this blog post I will take you through all the steps required in setting up a fully functioning private ethereum blockchain, inside your local network — which includes: + Setting up a private blockchain with ethereum using geth. * Setting up the MetaMask ethereum wallet to work with the private blockchain.+ Transfer funds between multiple accounts. * Create, deploy and invoke a smart contract on the private blockchain using remix. * Setting up ethereum block explorer over the private blockchain. Install Geth Go Ethereum (or geth) is one of the three original implementations (along with C+ + and Python) of the ethereum protocol. It is written in Go, fully open source and licensed under the GNU LGPL v3. Go Ethereum is available either as a standalone client called geth that you can install on pretty much any operating system, or as a library that you can embed in your Go, Android or iOS projects. To install geth on Mac OS X, we use homebrew. Homebrew installs the stuff you need that Apple didn’t. This blog assumes you have homebrew installed already, in case not check this out. Once you have homebrew installed, following commands will install geth. /ethereum reum brew tap ether, brew install e Installing geth on Ubuntu is straightforward, you just need to use apt-get — the commands are shown below. sudo apt-g P sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:thereum/ethereum sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install ethereum For Windows, you can find the corresponding geth installation here. If you find any difficulties in any of the above installations, check this out. Create a Miner Account First we need to create an account for ethereum mining. This will generate a public/private key pair for you — and will be password protected. Do not lose your password, otherwise you will never be able to recover the keys. By default, keys arestored inside, /keystore. Everything geth persists, gets written inside datadir (except for the PoW Ethash DAG). The default data directory locations are platform specific. It is always better to override the path of the datadir, and maintain your own location for your private blockchain. * Mac: ~/Library/Ethereum « Linux: ~/.ethereum * Windows: %APPDATA%\Ethereum The Ethash DAG is stored at ~/.ethash (Mac/Linux) or %APPDATA%\Ethash (Windows) so that it can be reused by all clients. Following command shows how to create an account, with a custom path for the datadir. Once completed, it will print your ethereum address. geth account new --datadir ory> init attach ipe:/geth.ipe Exampl geth --datadir /path/to/data/dir attach ipe:/path/to/data/dir /geth.ipe The console connects to the mining node over ipe. ipe (inter-process communications) works on the local computer. In this case geth creates an ipe pipe (which is represented by the file /geth.ipc) on local computer’s filesystem — and console makes the connection to that node over épe. View All Accounts Once you are connected to the geth console, you can try out the following command to list all the available accounts. counts 9b359e86893efa3d9732e4c65ced51567edd0") View Account Balance Following command shows how to view the balance of a given account from the geth console.> eth. getBalance ("0x7a69b359e86893efa3d9732e4c65ced51567edd0") 1.295e+21 Connect MetaMask Ethereum Wallet MetaMask is an ethereum wallet, running as a chrome extension. It injects the ethereum web3 API into every website’s javascript context, so that those apps can read from the blockchain. MetaMask also lets the user create and manage their own identities, so when an application wants to perform a transaction and write to the blockchain, the user gets a secure interface to review the transaction, before approving or rejecting it. To connect MetaMask to the private ethereum blockchain, we need to pick the right host name and the port. Web3 API is the ethereum javascript API implemented in web3.js. To talk to an ethereum node from a javascript application, MetaMask uses the web3.js library, which gives a convenient interface for the rpe methods. Under the hood it communicates to a local node through rpe calls. web3.js works with any ethereum node, which exposes an rpc layer. You might have noticed in the above, when we start the mining node, we can pass the parameter rpcapi to specify, which interfaces we need to expose from that node. By default, if you do not specify anything, eth,net, web3 — will be exposed. mo ¥ Main Ethereum Network local-eth-account *** psten Test Network ca eI 000 Kovan Test Network Rinkeby Test Network No transaction history. Co Mele react r sy} @ Custom RPC Transfer EtherMetaMask will create you an ethereum account — a private key and an ethereum address, Following shows you how to transfer ether from the first account you created at the very beginning to the MetaMask account, from the geth console. To transfer funds from an account, we have to use that account's private key for the signature. To use the private key, we need to unlock it, as shown below. personal. unlockAccount ( "0x7a69b359e86893efa3d9732e4c65ced51567edd0", "password") personal is a management API provided by geth. In addition to personal, geth also provides management APIs: admin, debug, miner and txpool. Once we unlock the account, we can define three variables in the console, for the sender, receiver and amount to be sent. The value of the sender is the ethereum address we created at the very beginning of this blog, and the value of the receiver is the ethereum address created under MetaMask. > var sender = "0x7a69b359e86893efa3d9732e4c6S5ced51567edd0"; > var receiver = "0xA9£28458e51170F285440990c196c1592D3a73£5" > var amount = web3.toWei(1, "ether") Following command will do the funds transfer — it refers the variables we defined above. > eth.sendTransaction({from:sender, to:receiver, value: amount}) View Account Balance In MetaMask Once we completed the funds transfer following the above steps, you can find the account balance in two ways. One way is directly from the MetaMask plugin, as shown. below. M 0 MSS. e &local-eth-account #2 OxA9f28... SENT TOKENS 1.000 305.99 US A Oo No transaction history. The other way is via the geth console, with the following command. > eth. getBalance ("0xA9£28458eE1170F285440990c196c1592D3a73£5") 1000000000000 oo Remex Solidity Editor Solidity is the most popular programming language to write ethereum smart contracts. Remix is an IDE for solidity and has an integrated debugger and testing environment. You can access remix online editor from here. Remix can be connected to any ethereum network. To connect it to our local blockchain, make sure that you have started your mining node with the following command, with the highlighted parameter. The meaning of this parameter was discussed before. Instead of “*” (which is more open) you can also use “https://remix.ethereum.org” as the value of rpccorsdomain. geth --mine --rpe --rpecorsdomain "*" --networkid -~ datadir To connect, remix to our private network, we need to change the Environment to Web3 Provider, under the tab Run. When you do this change, remix will prompt you to specify the Web3 Provider Endpoint — set the value http://localhost:8545. Unless you have changed the port explicitly, the default mining node will start on the port 8545. 4 Compile Run Settings Debugger Analysis Support Environment Web3 Provider $ Account 0x7a6...7edd0 (12324 ether) + Gas limit 3000000 Gas Price 0 Value ° Writing a Smart Contract Now we are all set to write our very first smart contract to run on ethereum. Copy the following code and paste it on the remix online editor. This is a very simple smart contract — and I do not wish to do a line by line explanation. In the next blog will explain solidity in detail. ragma solidity 0.4.11; // a string variable string public greeting; // the function with the same name constructor function greet. llo(string greeting) { eeting; // change function e greeting message Greeting (string _greeting) _greeting;// get the greeting mi function greet () greetin gr returns (string _greeting) If you have not changed any default settings in remix, it is set to auto compile. If not you need to compile. 4 Compile Run Settings Debugger Analysis Support @ Start to compile @ Auto compile browser/Untitled.sol:Hello $ Details Publish on Swarm After compiling, when you click on the Details button, it will show you the estimated gas need to create this smart contract. Introduction to Smart Contracts - Solidity 0.4.19 documentation Acontract in the sense of Solidity is a collection of code (its functions) and data (its state) that resides ata. solidity.readthedocs.io Deploying a Smart Contract Now we can deploy our smart contract to our private blockchain. Under the Run tab, make sure you have the right ethereum account selected, and then the right gas limit is specified. You can keep gas price and value as zero. + Compile Run Settings Debugger Analysis Support Environment Web3 Provider ¢ Account 0x7a6...7edd0 (15654 ether) 7KGas limit 3000000 Gas Price 0 Value ° browser/Untitled.sol:Hello AtAddress Enter contract's address - i.e. 0x60606... Create string greeting We use an ethereum transaction, signed by the selected account above to deploy the smart contract to the blockchain. To do the signing, first we need to unlock the account, via the geth console. > personal.unlockAccount ( "0x7a69b359086893ef£a3d9732e4c65ced51567edd0", "password") Now you can click on the Create button to deploy the smart contract. In our smart contract, we have a constructor which accepts a string parameter, that’s why remix shows you an input box along with the Create button. You can type some value there (within quotes, e.g: “Hi”) — or just keep it empty. You will see the following message on the geth console when you submit the smart contract for creation. Also note that, if you have not specified the right gas limit, the above will return an error. 10-19/07:31:08] Submitted contract creation hash=0x£5511bb9d088672ac0d3896b8590b9a3e2 a549ed33a contract=0x42b7E903Fb42e191a7D623chI 00£02deecdd739¢3 1n4330D329478 Invoking a Smart Contract Once you deploy the smart contract, remix UI gets changed a bit — as shown below, under the Run tab.browser/Untitied.sol:Hello at 0x42b...29d78 (blockchain) 5 greeting 0: string: greet tring: _greeting setGreeting string _greeting Now you can set some value to the setGreeting method — and click on it to invoke the smart contract. Once again, make sure that you have your account unlocked, because, to invoke a smart contract we use ethereum transactions and we need the signature of the initiator. Once done with the setGreeting method, you can invoke other methods too. * browser/Untitled.sol:Hello at 0x42b...29d78 (blockchain) ® greeting 0: string: Hi greet 0: string: _greeting Hi setGreeting "Hi" Ethereum Block Explorer You may be familiar with etherscan, which gives a lot of insights into the ethereum public blockchain. But we cannot use it to point to our local blockchain. Ethereum block explorer even though not as feature rich as etherscan, is quite useful to find out what is going on in our local blockchain. To setup ethereum block explorer first we need to get its source code from the following git repo. git clone https: //github.com/carsenk/explorerThen, run the following install command from the explorer directory. npm install Once the installation is done, start the ethereum block explorer with the following command — and then you can access the web console from http://localhost:8000. npm start ETHEREXPLORER ome acknaninf e cen ne Ere a on & Recent Blocks GE Yr cremainmondinortetsceisisoey ose cataarenaem @ ome To connect ethereum block explorer to our local blockchain, make sure that you have started your mining node with the following command, with the highlighted parameter — the meaning of this parameter was discussed before. geth dataa: @ --rpecorsdomain "*" --networkid -- o-data-directory>Update: There is a discussion on this blog on Hacker News. Please feel free to join https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id= 15509147 Summary In this blog post we discussed how to set up a private blockchain with ethereum using geth. Then we got MetaMask ethereum wallet to work with the private blockchain and transferred funds to the ethereum account created in MetaMask. remix online IDE was used to create, deploy and invoke a smart contract on the private blockchain. Finally we did set up ethereum block explorer over the private blockchain. Prabath Siriwardena Visit Amazon.com's Prabath Siriwardena Page and shop for all Prabath Siriwardena books. Check out pictures... Ethereum Blockchain Technology