Provisioning Mina node(s) on Digital Ocean droplets

About

Provisioning mina block producer nodes on mainnet/devnet on Digital Ocean using terraform and ansible.

Prerequisites

To be able to provision nodes, you will need the following:

• terraform
• ansible
• Digital Ocean account with billing enabled.
• (Optional) just simplify repeatedly running project-specific commands. See Justfile

Assumptions

Assumption is the mother of all... But mentioning them in the README makes them design choices.

The following were assumed:

• Users will create/copy their ssh key pair to ./secrets folder and set the key's name (not path) as prv_key value in terraform.tfvars. Default is id_rsa_DO_mina_node.
• Users will name their public ssh key on Digital Ocean as mina-do-ssh.

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Instructions

Table of contents

• Set-up
  • Secrets
    • DO token
    • SSH keys
    • my-wallet passphrase
• Provisioning
• Tips and Observations

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Set-up

git clone this repository and cd to the root folder of it.

git clone [email protected]:simisimis/mina-node-on-do.git minanode
cd minanode

Secrets

The following secrets are required:

• DO token
• SSH keys used to ssh/provision droplets
  • generate before provisioning
  • store SSH keys in secrets folder
  • add generated public key to DO and name it mina-do-ssh.
• Mina wallet private key passcode
  • typed in prompt during provisioning

DO token

In your DO web panel, go to API > Generate New Token. Store it for later use.

Generating SSH keys

Generate the ssh key pair and place it in the secrets folder:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 2048 -f ./secrets/id_rsa_DO_mina_node

Once the keys are in the secrets folder, add the generated public key to DO. You can either add it through web, or use curl to POST it.
NOTE: During terraform run it is expected that public ssh key on DO will be named mina-do-ssh

curl -X POST "https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/account/keys" -H "Authorization: Bearer <your DO token>" -d '{"name":"mina-do-ssh", "public_key":"<contents of ./secrets/id_rsa_DO_mina_node.pub>"}'

my-wallet passphrase

By default, mina wallet key pair is created during ansible run. If you want to use existing wallet, set a full path in terraform.tfvars assigned to mina_wallet variable. Whether you chose to use your own wallet key pair, or create it during provisioning, you will be prompted to type your wallet passphrase during ansible run.

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Provisioning

1. Set needed variables in terraform.tfvars that are defined in variables.tf
2. Create the Digital Ocean resources

# When running for the first time, run terraform init
terraform -chdir=terraform init

terraform -chdir=terraform apply -auto-approve

3. Provision mina node on created resources

ansible-playbook -i ./ansible/hosts --private-key=./secrets/id_rsa_DO_mina_node ./ansible/provision_nodes.yaml

After giving 5 minutes or so for the mina service to start, as a result you should have droplet(s) with mina block producer(s) running and listening on port 8302. You can ssh to the droplet(s) and inspect this with ss -ntlp command.

Tips and Observations

• mina application will most likely crash when starting on a host that has less than 16GB of RAM. Make sure you use the right plan for this.
• Digital Ocean droplet sizes can be retrieved with the following curl GET command:

# use `jq` to parse the json response
curl -X GET "https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/sizes" -H Authorization:\ Bearer\ <your DO token> |jq