Read the Beginners Guide First

This is a more intermediate guide. If you have not read the Beginners Guide, do that first.

If you are farming the Maize fork:

We were informed by a user that we had some conflicting ports with the Maize fork. Unfortunately one of those conflicts was with our full node tcp port (8655) and Maize's full node rpc port. This conflict will not allow you to connect to tranzact peers while running the Maize full node.

Therefore, if you want to mine Maize alongside our fork, please use the following workaround.

1. Make sure you have updated Tranzact to the newest version.
2. Stop all Tranzact and Maize services:

pkill tranzact && pkill maize

3. Open the Maize config file (home)/.maize/mainnet/config/config.yaml
4. Find and replace 8655 with 8677 in the Maize config.yaml file
5. Start all Tranzact services:

tranzact start all

6. Start all Maize services:

maize start all

We request that you run timelords if possible

We are a new network and we want to be able to support the capacity of the early network growth and prevent potential stalls by having ample timelords. If you are installing from source, please consider running a timelord. it will increase the stability of the network and will (slightly) increase your odds of winning a block if the network is ever stressed.

For Chia Farmers that want to join us

You can farm Tranzact using OG anf NFT Chia® plots. And we would love to have you!

However, in order to farm your Chia® plots on this or any other fork, you are required to enter the mnemonic seed of the private key that you created those Chia® plots with.

If you have been farming to the same wallet of the private key that your plots were created with, as a precaution, and before farming any Chia® fork, you should do the following.

1. Create a new Chia® private key (which will create a new wallet).
2. Move the XCH in the old wallet to the newly created wallet.
3. Set the farming reward address in (home)/.chia/mainnet/config/config.yaml to the new wallet address and restart your Chia® services.

This will ensure that even if someone gets your mnemonic seed they would have no XCH to steal, and technically could only use it to farm your plots.

We suggest anyone that is farming other forks do the same with those wallets.

Install

To install tranzact-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 $TRANZACT_ROOT environment variable or at ~/.tranzact/mainnet/. You can find databases, and logs there. Optionally, you can set $TRANZACT_ROOT to the .tranzact directory in your home directory with export TRANZACT_ROOT=~/.tranzact and if you add it to your .bashrc or .zshrc to it will remain set across logouts and reboots. If you set $TRANZACT_ROOT you will have to migrate configuration items by hand or unset the variable for tranzact init to work with unset TRANZACT_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 232 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.

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

If you want more peers and better network connectivity, you should also try opening port 8655 on your router so other peers can connect to you. Follow this guide but using port 8655 instead of 8333. This helps the network be more decentralized. For further details about sync issues and port 8655, visit the Resolving Sync Issues page.

Farming Tranzact with your existing Chia® plots

To start, find the mnemonic seed of the key that you created your Chia® plots with. This key can be obtained from the cli:

chia keys show --show-mnemonic-seed

or by clicking the eye icon beside your key on the "Select Key" page in the Chia® GUI

CLI

1. Create a plain text file with your mnemonic seed (all words in order with a single space between each one and no trailing or leading whitespace) and save it as seed.txt in your home directory.

2. in the console:

tranzact init

tranzact keys add -f ~/seed.txt

3. you may get a permissions warning when you do this. If so run:

tranzact init --fix-ssl-permissions

4. add your plot directories

tranzact plots add -d ~/your/plot/directory1
tranzact plots add -d ~/your/plot/directory2

5. check that your plots are valid

tranzact plots check

6. start tranzact services

tranzact start all

7. check the chain status

tranzact show -s

8. check wallet status

tranzact wallet show

GUI

1. Open the Tranzact GUI and click the "IMPORT FROM MNEMONICS (24 WORDS)" button.

2. Enter the 24 word mnemonic of your Chia® plot key.

3. Click on the "Plots" button on the left menu.

4. Click on the "Add Plot Directory" link on the plots card.

4. Add all of your Chia plot directories.

Using the Command-line Interface (CLI)

Using the CLI with Tranzact gives you greater and more precise control. For a more details on the commands, read the CLI Commands Reference.

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\Tranzact-Blockchain\app-1.1.5\resources\app.asar.unpacked\daemon\. Try .\tranzact -h or .\tranzact 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\Tranzact-Blockchain\app-1.1.5\resources\app.asar.unpacked\daemon\ and press the enter key.

3. Read Tranzact help

   On PowerShell type .\tranzact -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 ".tranzact\mainnet\log\debug.log" with a text editor like notepad or see it as it runs in PowerShell by using Get-Content, Get-Content ~\.tranzact\mainnet\log\debug.log -wait.

MacOS

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

A handy trick is to add that directory to your path - export PATH=/Applications/Tranzact.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 Tranzact with the Linux installer files, your tranzact executable should be in one of the following locations:

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

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

If you installed from source (using git), just activate and run tranzact 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 tranzact-blockchain directory, or the Windows "Tranzact 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

tranzact init

Generate keys

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

tranzact keys generate

Run a full node + farmer + harvester + wallet

To run a full node on port 8655, and connect to the mainnet, run the following command. Logs are usually at ~/.tranzact/mainnet/logs/debug.log or ~.tranzact\mainnet\logs\debug.log on Windows

sh install-gui.sh
cd tranzact-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 tranzact 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.

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

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

Run a timelord

Note If you want to run a Timelord on Linux, see BUILD_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 tranzact-blockchain directory:

. ./activate
sh install-timelord.sh
tranzact 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.

tranzact start simulator

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 8655 for incoming connections. If this causes issues, you can disable it in config.yaml. Or you can run this command: tranzact configure -upnp false Some routers may require port forwarding, or enabling UPnP in the router's configuration.

RPC Interface

The Node has an RPC Interface with documentation.