nwaku-compose/README.md

nwaku-compose

Ready to use docker-compose to run your own nwaku full node:

• nwaku node running relay and store protocols with RLN enabled.
• Simple frontend to interact with your node and the network, to publish and receive messages.
• Grafana dashboard for advanced users or node operators.
• Requires docker-compose and git.

📝 0. Prerequisites

You need:

• Ethereum Sepolia WebSocket endpoint. Get one free from Infura.
• Ethereum Sepolia account with some balance <0.01 Eth. Get some here.
• A password to protect your rln membership.

docker-compose will read the ./.env file from the filesystem. There is .env.example available for you as a template to use for providing the above values. The process when working with .env files is to copy the .env.example, store it as .env and edit the values there.

cp .env.example .env
${EDITOR} .env

Make sure to NOT place any secrets into .env.example, as they might be unintentionally published in the Git repository.

🔑 1. Register RLN membership

The RLN membership is your access key to The Waku Network. Its registration is done onchain, and allows your nwaku node to publish messages in a decentralized and private way, respecting some rate limits. Messages exceeding the rate limit won't be relayed by other peers.

This command will register your membership and store it in keystore/keystore.json. Note that if you just want to relay traffic (not publish), you don't need one.

./register_rln.sh

🖥️ 2. Start your node

Start all processes: nwaku node, database and grafana for metrics. Your RLN membership is loaded into nwaku under the hood.

docker-compose up -d

⚠️ The node might take ~5' the very first time it runs because it needs to build locally the RLN community membership tree.

🏄🏼‍♂️ 3. Interact with your nwaku node

• See http://localhost:3000/d/yns_4vFVk/nwaku-monitoring for node metrics.
• See localhost:4000. Under development 🚧

📬 4. Use the REST API

Your nwaku node exposes a REST API to interact with it.

# get nwaku version
curl http://127.0.0.1:8645/debug/v1/version
# get nwaku info
curl http://127.0.0.1:8645/debug/v1/info

Publish a message to a contentTopic. Everyone subscribed to it will receive it. Note that payload is base64 encoded.

curl -X POST "http://127.0.0.1:8645/relay/v1/auto/messages" \
 -H "content-type: application/json" \
 -d '{"payload":"'$(echo -n "Hello Waku Network - from Anonymous User" | base64)'","contentTopic":"/my-app/2/chatroom-1/proto"}'

Get messages sent to a contentTopic. Note that any store node in the network is used to reply.

curl -X GET "http://127.0.0.1:8645/store/v1/messages?contentTopics=%2Fmy-app%2F2%2Fchatroom-1%2Fproto&pageSize=50&ascending=true" \
 -H "accept: application/json"

For advanced documentation, refer to ADVANCED.md.

Node operator recognition

We appreciate the participation on The Waku Network!

With that, for those aiming to have their nodes monitored we encourage to do the following:

1. Establish a fixed and private node key. Create a 64 character random hex string with:

openssl rand -hex 32

and paste it in the NODEKEY env var.

Example:

NODEKEY=90200835bf53c689559bdd420fcab1a9057454377ccd9ae938fcf3b9b4c40785

2. Restart your node (docker compose down & docker-compose up -d)

3. Wait a few minutes and retrieve your public multiaddress with the following command:

curl -X GET http://localhost:8645/debug/v1/info | sed -n 's/.*listenAddresses":\["\(.*\)"\].*/\1/p'

You should see something similar to:

/ip4/57.129.6.17/tcp/30304/p2p/16Uiu2HAmD4dpgoGKXHjEp5749uPpDwRm6Bpf4TuKTKrj6ErsAa1N

⚠️ Make sure your node always retrieve the same public multiaddress. This can be checked by restarting the node twice.

4. Send that public address to us on Discord: https://discord.com/channels/1110799176264056863/1216748184592711691