Setting up a Corda network

A Corda network consists of a number of machines running nodes. These nodes communicate using persistent protocols in order to create and validate transactions.

There are three broader categories of functionality one such node may have. These pieces of functionality are provided as services, and one node may run several of them.

Notary: Nodes running a notary service witness state spends and have the final say in whether a transaction is a double-spend or not
Oracle: Network services that link the ledger to the outside world by providing facts that affect the validity of transactions
Regular node: All nodes have a vault and may start protocols communicating with other nodes, notaries and oracles and evolve their private ledger

Setting up your own network

Certificates

Every node in a given Corda network must have an identity certificate signed by the network's root CA. See permissioning for more information.

Configuration

A node can be configured by adding/editing node.conf in the node's directory. For details see corda-configuration-file.

An example configuration:

example-code/src/main/resources/example-node.conf

The most important fields regarding network configuration are:

p2pAddress: This specifies a host and port to which Artemis will bind for messaging with other nodes. Note that the address bound will NOT be my-corda-node, but rather :: (all addresses on all network interfaces). The hostname specified is the hostname that must be externally resolvable by other nodes in the network. In the above configuration this is the resolvable name of a machine in a VPN.
rpcAddress: The address to which Artemis will bind for RPC calls.
notary.serviceLegalName: The name of the notary service, required to setup distributed notaries with the network-bootstrapper.

Starting the nodes

You will first need to create the local network by bootstrapping it with the bootstrapper. Details of how to do that can be found in network-bootstrapper.

Once that's done you may now start the nodes in any order. You should see a banner, some log lines and eventually Node started up and registered, indicating that the node is fully started.

In terms of process management there is no prescribed method. You may start the jars by hand or perhaps use systemd and friends.

Logging

Only a handful of important lines are printed to the console. For details/diagnosing problems check the logs.

Logging is standard log4j2 and may be configured accordingly. Logs are by default redirected to files in NODE_DIRECTORY/logs/.

Connecting to the nodes

Once a node has started up successfully you may connect to it as a client to initiate protocols/query state etc. Depending on your network setup you may need to tunnel to do this remotely.

See the tutorial-clientrpc-api on how to establish an RPC link.

Sidenote: A client is always associated with a single node with a single identity, which only sees their part of the ledger.

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