mkchain 6.9.0

A utility to generate k8s configs for a Tezos blockchain

• Install mkchain
• Generate Helm Values
  • mkchain parameters
• Create Tezos Chain

mkchain

Helper program to generate values for the Tezos chain Helm chart

Prerequisites

To run mkchain, you must either have docker or pytezos installed.

Installing Docker

To be consistent with other documentation in this project, we describe how to install docker with minikube. We need to install:

- [docker](https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/),
- [minikube](https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/),
- [helm](https://helm.sh/),
- and `python3`.

Start minikube and configure your shell environment to use minikube's Docker daemon:

minikube start

eval $(minikube docker-env)

Installing pytezos

This is documented at: https://pytezos.org/quick_start.html#requirements

Install mkchain

mkdir mkchain && cd mkchain
python3 -m venv .venv
. .venv/bin/activate
pip install wheel && pip install mkchain

Set unbuffered IO for python:

export PYTHONUNBUFFERED=x

Generate Helm Values

Set as an environment variable the name you would like to give to your chain:

export CHAIN_NAME=my-chain

Your chain is uniquely defined by a set of values such as bootstrap account keys, chain id, timestamp...

To generate these values run:

mkchain $CHAIN_NAME

This command will create a yaml file in your current working directory: <$CHAIN_NAME>_values.yaml

If you configure your chain to run over a Zerotier VPN, mkchain will create an additional file for invitees to join your network: <$CHAIN_NAME>_invite_values.yaml.

mkchain parameters

You can explicitly specify some values by:

• passing CLI parameters to mkchain
• directly modifying the values yaml file generated by mkchain
• passing arguments to helm install or helm upgrade commands using the --set flag, which will selectively override the current yaml values

YAML Key	mkchain argument	Description	Default
	-h	mkchain help message
	-v	mkchain version
	--number-of-bakers	Number of baking nodes in the cluster	1
	--number-of-nodes	Number of non-baking nodes in the cluster	0
bootstrap_peers	--bootstrap-peers	Peer ips to connect to	[]
expected_proof_of_work	--expected-proof-of-work	Node identity generation difficulty	0
images.octez	--octez-docker-image	Version of the Octez docker image to run	tezos/tezos:v14-release
	--use-docker (--no...)	Use (or don't use) docker to generate keys rather than pytezos	autodetect
zerotier_config.zerotier_network	--zerotier-network	Zerotier network id for external chain access
zerotier_config.zerotier_token	--zerotier-token	Zerotier token for external chain access

Create Tezos Chain

Make sure you have the Tezos Helm chart repo:

helm repo add oxheadalpha https://oxheadalpha.github.io/tezos-helm-charts

Then install the Tezos Helm chart:

helm install $CHAIN_NAME oxheadalpha/tezos-chain \
--values ./${CHAIN_NAME}_values.yaml \
--namespace oxheadalpha --create-namespace