Containerizing Bitcoin
There are over 500,000 lines of code in Bitcoin Core, roughly 70% of which is pure C++. Compile times vary, but if you just want to get a node up and running, docker is the easiest way to go. Here’s something I prepared earlier…
Courtesy of the official docs, there are only four commands to run which build bitcoind, bitcoin-cli and bitcoin-qt. The dependencies are clearly outlined for different architectures - including OSx, Windows and Unix flavours - but in my Dockerfile I have chosen to extend Ubuntu. Checkout the repository linked above to build the image yourself or use gregdhill/bitcoin:latest.
version: '3'
services:
node_1:
image: gregdhill/bitcoin:latest
network_mode: host
ports:
- "8333:8333"
command: bitcoind -regtest -port=8333 -rpcport=18443 -rpcuser=admin -rpcpassword=admin
node_2:
image: gregdhill/bitcoin:latest
network_mode: host
ports:
- "8334:8334"
command: bitcoind -regtest -port=8334 -rpcport=18444 -rpcuser=admin -rpcpassword=admin -addnode=127.0.0.1:8333
depends_on:
- node_1
node_3:
image: gregdhill/bitcoin:latest
network_mode: host
ports:
- "8335:8335"
command: bitcoind -regtest -port=8335 -rpcport=18445 -rpcuser=admin -rpcpassword=admin -addnode=127.0.0.1:8333
depends_on:
- node_1
node_4:
image: gregdhill/bitcoin:latest
network_mode: host
ports:
- "8336:8336"
command: bitcoind -regtest -port=8336 -rpcport=18446 -rpcuser=admin -rpcpassword=admin -addnode=127.0.0.1:8333
depends_on:
- node_1
Save the source above as docker-compose.yaml and run docker-compose up to start a local four node network running in regression test mode. With this, it is possible to generate new blocks instantaneously through the JSON RPC. We can utilise bitcoin-cli from the same docker image to create an arbitrary number of transactions:
address=$(docker run --network="host" gregdhill/bitcoin:latest bitcoin-cli -rpcpassword=admin -rpcuser=admin -regtest getnewaddress)
docker run --network="host" gregdhill/bitcoin:latest bitcoin-cli -rpcpassword=admin -rpcuser=admin -regtest generatetoaddress 100 "${address}"
If we query the same RPC manually, we can observe the latest block height via getmininginfo:
curl --user admin:admin -H 'content-type:text/plain;' --data-binary '{"id":"1", "jsonrpc":"1.0", "method": "getmininginfo", "params":[]}' http://localhost:18443
Alternatively we can verify that the node has four peers total (including itself) using the getpeerinfo method.
For a full list of methods, checkout the wiki.