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Launch a local Ceramic node


The Ceramic command line interface provides an easy way to start a JS Ceramic node in a local Node.js environment. This is a great way to get started developing with Ceramic before moving to a cloud-hosted node for production use cases.

Prerequisites


Installing the CLI requires a console, Node.js v16, and npm v6. Make sure to have these installed on your machine.

caution

While npm v7 is not officially supported, you may still be able to get it to work. You will need to install the node-pre-gyp package globally. This is required until node-webrtc which IPFS depends on is upgraded.

npm install -g node-pre-gyp

Installation and usage


Install the Ceramic CLI

Open your console and install the CLI using npm:

npm install -g @ceramicnetwork/cli

Launch the Ceramic node

Use the ceramic daemon command to start a local JS Ceramic node connected to the Clay Testnet at https://localhost:7007.

ceramic daemon

Configure your network

(Optional) By default, the JS CLI starts a node on the Clay Testnet. If you would like to use a different network, you can specify this using the --network option. View available networks. Note, the CLI can not be used with Mainnet.

Configure a node URL

(Optional) It is possible to use the CLI with a remote Ceramic node over HTTP, instead of a local node. To do this, use the config set command to set the ceramicHost variable to the URL of the node you wish to use.

ceramic config set ceramicHost 'https://yourceramicnode.com'