Run a Bitcoin Core full node on CentOS 7

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Mattias Geniar, February 25, 2019

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It’s fairly simple to run a full bitcoin node on CentOS 7, if you want to compile one from source. Alternatively, you can run the bitcoind daemon in a Docker container too. These steps will get your server ready to compile Bitcoin from source.

Prepare your build environment to compile Bitcoin Core

The next steps will install a compiler and all development libraries needed to compile Bitcoin Core.

$ yum -y install epel-release

Once EPEL is installed (which adds additional repositories), you can install all needed dependencies.

$ yum install -y autoconf automake boost-devel gcc-c++ git libdb4-cxx libdb4-cxx-devel libevent-devel libtool openssl-devel wget

Next, compile Bitcoin Core.

Compile Bitcoin Core from source

With all dependencies in place, it’s time to compile Bitcoin Core. I’ll start by creating a custom user that will run the daemon.

$ useradd bitcoin
$ su - bitcoin

Now, while running as the new bitcoin user, clone & compile the project.

$ git clone https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.git
$ cd bitcoin
$ git checkout v0.17.1

These steps prepare version 0.17.1 on your system. For an up-to-date list of which versions have been tagged, look at the Github releases of Bitcoin Core.

Now with the correct code in place, time to compile.

$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make -j $(nproc)

This’ll take a couple of minutes to fully compile.

Running Bitcoin Core

With these steps completed, you now have a couple of binaries in place to help you run Bitcoin Core.

$ ls -alh src/
...
-rwxrwxr-x.  1 bitcoin bitcoin  8.3M Feb 20 16:45 bitcoin-cli
-rwxrwxr-x.  1 bitcoin bitcoin  114M Feb 20 16:45 bitcoind
...

You can run them from the compiled src directory, or move them over to a location where you prefer to keep your binaries.

If you followed these steps, you’ll find the CLI tool at /home/bitcoin/bitcoin/src/bitcoin-cli

$ /home/bitcoin/bitcoin/src/bitcoin-cli --version
Bitcoin Core RPC client version v0.17.1

And the Bitcoin Core daemon at /home/bitcoin/bitcoin/src/bitcoind.

$ /home/bitcoin/bitcoin/src/bitcoind --version
Bitcoin Core Daemon version v0.17.1
Copyright (C) 2009-2018 The Bitcoin Core developers

Have fun!

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