As you know, we’ll be welcoming you all to the beta node olympics this summer. A big part of that will be lowering the barrier to entry, and getting nodes in as many people’s hands as possible.
We’ll be working iteratively to ease the friction around running a node, with the first target being eliminating the need for any knowledge of the command line to get things going.
This is still early doors, but we want to see how this feels, and for you to help us test an initial build of a text-driven interface that won’t require that CLI knowledge.
Over the coming days we’ll be giving this a handy build so users can download and use it like a typical app.
But for now, we are asking our intrepid community to build things manually, in order to test the interface for us. It’ll require sudo
or admin
privileges on your machine (we’re working to avoid that, a PR was just accepted upstream, so mac/linux will avoid this password prompt soon).
What is it.
If you grabmain
branch of the repo and run cargo build --bin node-launchpad --release
on your machine, and go to target/release
in the repository folder you’ll see a node-launchpad
executable!
Double clicking this should do a few things.
- Open a terminal
- Prompt for
sudo
if it can. - Show the node launchpad with some simple options for managing nodes on your machine.
Pressing the highlighted keys should manage background node services for you.
What it is not
A viable network! Don’t expect nodes started here to connect to anything at the moment. The main stable
network is down while we address some alpha-punch
issues. But soon you’ll be able to use this there.
Windows
On Windows you’ll need to run the app in admin mode. This should be possible via right click menu and " Run as Administrator".
On Windows you’ll also need to ensure you have this binary installed and in your path
, and it also needs to be called WinSW.exe
(not WinSW-x64.exe
).
Trouble shooting
If cargo build --bin node-launchpad --release
is a bit much for now, please sit tight, we’ll get you some pre-built versions soon.
Any other issues, please let us know and we’ll take a look ASAP!
What we’re looking for here
- Does double clicking to open work?
- Any other issues at the moment?
- What platform are you on?
- Other issues?
We won’t stop here!
We’ll be iterating on this rapidly (that’s why we need your help ofc), adding in the installer, smooth onboarding to the rewards program, automation to help out spinning up node… and of course stepping towards native interfaces as we expand the reach of the Network!