Vechain Thor

A general purpose blockchain highly compatible with Ethereum's ecosystem.

This is the first implementation written in golang.

  

Table of contents

• Installation
  • Requirements
  • Clone the repo
  • Building
• Running Thor
  • Sub-commands
• Docker
• Explorers
• Faucet
• RESTful API
• Acknowledgement
• Contributing

Installation

Requirements

Thor requires Go 1.19+ and C compiler to build. To install Go, follow this link.

Clone the repo

Clone the Thor repo:

git clone https://github.com/vechain/thor.git
cd thor

To see a list of all available commands, run make help

Building

To build the main app thor, just run

make

or build the full suite:

make all

If no errors are reported, all built executable binaries will appear in folder bin.

Running Thor

Connect to Vechain's mainnet:

bin/thor --network main

Connect to Vechain's testnet:

bin/thor --network test

or startup a custom network

bin/thor --network <custom-net-genesis.json>

An example genesis config file can be found at genesis/example.json.

To show usages of all command line options:

bin/thor -h

Flag	Description
--network	The network to join (main|test) or path to the genesis file
--data-dir	Directory for blockchain databases (default: "/Users/darren/Library/Application Support/org.vechain.thor")
--cache	Megabytes of RAM allocated to trie nodes cache (default: 4096)
--beneficiary	Address for block rewards
--target-gas-limit	Target block gas limit (adaptive if set to 0) (default: 0)
--api-addr	API service listening address (default: "localhost:8669")
--api-cors	Comma-separated list of domains from which to accept cross-origin requests to API
--api-timeout	API request timeout value in milliseconds (default: 10000)
--api-call-gas-limit	Limit contract call gas (default: 50000000)
--api-backtrace-limit	Limit the distance between 'position' and best block for subscriptions APIs (default: 1000)
--api-allow-custom-tracer	Allow custom JS tracer to be used for the tracer API
--verbosity	Log verbosity (0-9) (default: 3)
--max-peers	Maximum number of P2P network peers (P2P network disabled if set to 0) (default: 25)
--p2p-port	P2P network listening port (default: 11235)
--nat	Port mapping mechanism (any|none|upnp|pmp|extip:) (default: "any")
--bootnode	Comma-separated list of bootnode IDs
--skip-logs	Skip writing event|transfer logs (/logs API will be disabled)
--pprof	Turn on go-pprof
--disable-pruner	Disable state pruner to keep all history
--help, -h	Show help
--version, -v	Print the version

Sub-commands

• solo client runs in solo mode for test & dev

# create new block when there is pending transaction
bin/thor solo --on-demand

# save blockchain data to disk(default to memory)
bin/thor solo --persist

# two options can work together
bin/thor solo --persist --on-demand

• master-key master key management

# print the master address
bin/thor master-key

# export master key to keystore
bin/thor master-key --export > keystore.json


# import master key from keystore
cat keystore.json | bin/thor master-key --import

Docker

Docker is one quick way for running a vechain node:

docker run -d\
  -v {path-to-your-data-directory}/.org.vechain.thor:/home/thor/.org.vechain.thor\
  -p 127.0.0.1:8669:8669 -p 11235:11235 -p 11235:11235/udp\
  --name thor-node vechain/thor --network test

Do not forget to add the --api-addr 0.0.0.0:8669 flag if you want other containers and/or hosts to have access to the RESTful API. Thor binds to localhost by default and it will not accept requests outside the container itself without the flag.

Release v2.0.4 changed the default user from root (UID: 0) to thor (UID: 1000). Ensure that UID 1000 has rwx permissions on the data directory of the docker host. You can do that with ACL sudo setfacl -R -m u:1000:rwx {path-to-your-data-directory}, or update ownership with sudo chown -R 1000:1000 {path-to-your-data-directory}.

Docker Compose

A docker-compose.yml file is provided for convenience. It will create a container with the same configuration as the command above.

version: '3.8.'

services:
  thor-node:
    image: vechain/thor
    container_name: thor-node
    command: --network test --api-addr 0.0.0.0:8669
    volumes:
      - thor-data:/home/thor
    ports:
      - "8669:8669"
      - "11235:11235"
      - "11235:11235/udp"

volumes:
  thor-data:

Explorers

• Vechain Explorer (Official)
• VechainStats
• Insight

Testnet faucet

• faucet.vecha.in by Vechain Foundation

API

Once thor has started, the online OpenAPI documentation can be accessed in your browser. e.g. http://localhost:8669/ by default.

Acknowledgement

A special shout out to following projects:

• Ethereum
• Swagger
• Stoplight Elements

Contributing

• Please refer to CONTRIBUTING.md on how to contribute to this project.

License

Vechain Thor is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0, also included in LICENSE file in repository.