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Launch a local Ceramic node

To run a local Ceramic node you will generally need to run two key components:

  • js-ceramic - an api interface for Ceramic applications
  • ceramic-one - a binary that provides a Ceramic data network access through the protocol implementation in Rust.

You should always start with running the ceramic-one component first to make sure that the js-ceramic component can connect to it.

Prerequisites​

Installing the js-ceramic requires the following:

Make sure to have these installed on your machine.

Setting up the ceramic-one component​

The easiest way to install the ceramic-one is using Homebrew package manager. After installing Homebrew on your local machine, you can install ceramic-one using the following command:

brew install ceramicnetwork/tap/ceramic-one

Once installed, run the ceramic-one binary by running the command provided below. Not that using the flag --network you can modify the network:

ceramic-one daemon --network testnet-clay
note

There are many flags for the daemon CLI that can be passed directly or set as environment variables. You can pass the -h flag to see the complete list as follows:

ceramic-one daemon -h

You also have an option of running the ceramic-one binary using Docker. Check out the instructions in the README of rust-ceramic repository.

Setting up the js-ceramic component​

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.

Install the Ceramic CLI​

Open your console and install the CLI using npm:

npm install -g @ceramicnetwork/cli

Launch the js-ceramic node​

Use the ceramic daemon command to start a local JS Ceramic node connected to the Clay Testnet by default running 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'

Monitoring​

You can always check if js-ceramic and ceramic-one components are available by running the commands listed below.

js-ceramic service's availability​

Check the js-ceramic service’s availability with the healthcheck endpoint:

curl http://localhost:7007/api/v0/node/healthcheck

ceramic-one service's availability​

Check the ceramic-one service’s availability with the liveness endpoint:

curl http://127.0.0.1:5101/ceramic/liveness