Load from a snapshot

The initial run of a full node, as outlined in the get started guide, takes ~20 hours to fully sync with the other nodes in the network. In other words, it takes this time to download a complete copy of the blockchain.

In order to speed up this initial sync process, snapshots are made available in the dedicated Alephium archives repository. An automated process is scheduled to upload snapshots for both testnet and mainnet networks.

Snapshots for pruned nodes are also provided to reduce the disk requirement for the full node.

Download the snapshot

Before running full node for the first time, you can download the latest snapshot and extract (it's a tar file) it at the right location. The snippet does this inline, i.e. without requiring extra disk space to download the snapshot before extracting it:

ALEPHIUM_HOME=~/.alephium
ALEPHIUM_NETWORK=mainnet       # Possible values: `mainnet`, `testnet`
INDEXES_CONFIG=with-indexes    # Possible values: `with-indexes`, `without-indexes`
NODE_TYPE=full                 # Possible values: `full`, `pruned`
curl -L "$(curl -sL https://archives.alephium.org/archives/$ALEPHIUM_NETWORK/$NODE_TYPE-node-data/_latest_$INDEXES_CONFIG.txt)" | tar xf - -C "$ALEPHIUM_HOME/"

A snapshot is created with advanced node indexes enabled to support the development and operation of dApps. You can also start from a snapshot without node indexes to save disk space.

Note that node indexes are always disabled for pruned snapshot.

Using a ready-made script

While the command given above works, it does not cover all the edge failure cases that can happen and can lead the full node database in an inconsistent state. Luckily a ready-to-use script will help you with this task.

ALEPHIUM_HOME=/tmp
ALEPHIUM_NETWORK=mainnet
curl -L https://github.com/touilleio/alephium-standalone/raw/main/snapshot-loader.sh | env ALEPHIUM_HOME=${ALEPHIUM_HOME} ALEPHIUM_NETWORK=${ALEPHIUM_NETWORK} sh

Launch a standalone container

And finally if you want to try this setup quickly, an OCI image, simply extending the official alephium/alephium image, is doing all the steps describe above automagically: touilleio/alephium-standalone. Its source code provides all the required details around its usage.

A quick reference command to run the standalone container is given below for convenience:

ALEPHIUM_HOME=/tmp
ALEPHIUM_NETWORK=mainnet
docker run -p 39973:39973 -p 127.0.0.1:12973:12973 \
  -v ${ALEPHIUM_HOME}:/alephium-home/.alephium \
  -e ALEPHIUM_NETWORK=${ALEPHIUM_NETWORK} touilleio/alephium-standalone:latest