Gecko

Installation

Avalanche is an incredibly lightweight protocol, so the minimum computer requirements are quite modest.

• Hardware: 2 GHz or faster CPU, 4 GB RAM, 2 GB hard disk.
• OS: Ubuntu >= 18.04 or Mac OS X >= Catalina.
• Software: Go version >= 1.13.X and set up $GOPATH.
• Network: IPv4 or IPv6 network connection, with an open public port.

Native Install

Clone the Gecko repository:

go get -v -d github.com/ava-labs/gecko/...
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/ava-labs/gecko

Building the Gecko Executable

Build Gecko using the build script:

./scripts/build.sh

The Gecko binary, named avalanche, is in the build directory.

Docker Install

• Make sure you have docker installed on your machine (so commands like docker run etc. are available).
• Build the docker image of latest gecko branch by scripts/build_image.sh.
• Check the built image by docker image ls, you should see some image tagged gecko-xxxxxxxx, where xxxxxxxx is the commit id of the Gecko source it was built from.
• Test Gecko by docker run -ti -p 9650:9650 -p 9651:9651 gecko-xxxxxxxx /gecko/build/avalanche --network-id=local --staking-enabled=false --snow-sample-size=1 --snow-quorum-size=1. (For a production deployment, you may want to extend the docker image with required credentials for staking and TLS.)

Running Gecko

Connecting to Everest

To connect to the Everest Testnet, run:

./build/avalanche

You should see some pretty ASCII art and log messages.

You can use Ctrl + C to kill the node.

Creating a Local Testnet

To create a single node testnet, run:

./build/avalanche --network-id=local --staking-enabled=false --snow-sample-size=1 --snow-quorum-size=1

This launches an Avalanche network with one node.