metalgo

README

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Node implementation for the Metal network. At its core Metal is a fork of the Avalanche project and aims to maintain upstream changes.

Installation

The minimum recommended hardware specification for nodes connected to Mainnet is:

• CPU: Equivalent of 8 AWS vCPU
• RAM: 16 GiB
• Storage: 250GiB
• OS: Ubuntu 20.04/22.04 or macOS >= 12
• Network: Reliable IPv4 or IPv6 network connection, with an open public port.

If you plan to build MetalGo from source, you will also need the following software:

• Go version >= 1.20.10
• gcc
• g++

Building From Source

Clone The Repository

Clone the MetalGo repository:

git clone git@github.com:MetalBlockchain/metalgo.git
cd metalgo

This will clone and checkout the master branch.

Building the Metal Executable

Build Metal using the build script:

./scripts/build.sh

The Metal binary, named metalgo, is in the build directory.

Docker Install

Make sure Docker is installed on the machine - so commands like docker run etc. are available.

Building the docker image of latest metalgo branch can be done by running:

./scripts/build_image.sh

To check the built image, run:

docker image ls

The image should be tagged as metalblockchain/metalgo:xxxxxxxx, where xxxxxxxx is the shortened commit of the Metal source it was built from. To run the Metal node, run:

docker run -ti -p 9650:9650 -p 9651:9651 metalblockchain/metalgo:xxxxxxxx /metalgo/build/metalgo

Running Metal

Connecting to Mainnet

To connect to the Metal Mainnet, run:

./build/metalgo

You should see some pretty ASCII art and log messages.

You can use Ctrl+C to kill the node.

Connecting to Tahoe

To connect to the Tahoe Testnet, run:

./build/metalgo --network-id=tahoe

Supported Platforms

MetalGo can run on different platforms, with different support tiers:

• Tier 1: Fully supported by the maintainers, guaranteed to pass all tests including e2e and stress tests.
• Tier 2: Passes all unit and integration tests but not necessarily e2e tests.
• Tier 3: Builds but lightly tested (or not), considered experimental.
• Not supported: May not build and not tested, considered unsafe. To be supported in the future.

The following table lists currently supported platforms and their corresponding MetalGo support tiers:

Architecture	Operating system	Support tier
amd64	Linux	1
arm64	Linux	2
amd64	Darwin	2
amd64	Windows	3
arm	Linux	Not supported
i386	Linux	Not supported
arm64	Darwin	Not supported

To officially support a new platform, one must satisfy the following requirements:

MetalGo continuous integration	Tier 1	Tier 2	Tier 3
Build passes	✓	✓	✓
Unit and integration tests pass	✓	✓
End-to-end and stress tests pass	✓

Security Bugs

We and our community welcome responsible disclosures.

We're working on a bug bountry program, in the meantime please submit any bugs or vulnerabilities to bugs@metalblockchain.org