Admin Guide

Stellar Core is the program nodes use to communicate with other nodes to create and maintain the Stellar peer-to-peer network. It's an implementation of the Stellar Consensus Protocol configured to construct a chain of ledgers guaranteed to be in agreement across all participating nodes at all times.

These pages describe various aspects of installing, configuring, and maintaining a stellar-core node.

📄️ Prerequisites

You can install Stellar Core a number of different ways, and once you do, you can configure it to participate in the network on a several different levels: it can be either a Basic Validator or a Full Validator. No matter how you install Stellar Core or what kind of node you run, however, you need to set up and connect to the peer-to-peer network and store the state of the ledger in a SQL database.

📄️ Installing

There are three common ways to install and run Stellar Core:

📄️ Configuring

Before attempting to configure stellar-core, it is highly recommended to first try running a private network or joining the test network.

📄️ Environment Preparation

Initialize the Database and Local State

📄️ Publishing History Archives

If you want to run a Full Validator, you need to set up your node to publish a history archive. You can host an archive using a blob store such as Amazon's S3 or Digital Ocean's spaces, or you can simply serve a local archive directly via an HTTP server such as Nginx or Apache. If you're setting up a Basic Validator, you can skip this section. No matter what kind of node you're planning to run, make sure to set it up to get history, which is covered in Environment Preparation.

📄️ Running

Starting Your Node

📄️ Logging

Stellar Core sends logs to standard error and stellar-core.log by default, configurable with the LOGFILEPATH field.

📄️ Monitoring

Once your node is up and running, it's important to keep an eye on it to make sure it stays afloat and continues to contribute to the health of the overall network. To help with that, Stellar Core exposes vital information that you can use to monitor your node and diagnose potential problems.

📄️ Maintenance

Maintenance here refers to anything involving taking your validator temporarily out of the network (to apply security patches, system upgrade, etc).

📄️ Upgrading the Network

The network itself has network wide settings that can be updated.

📄️ Soroban Settings

Soroban has a large collection of settings stored on-ledger that can be modified through a validator vote. Here you can find out how to propose a new settings upgrade as well as how to examine a proposed upgrade. You can also look at the Commands page for more details on the stellar-core commands used below.

📄️ Commands

Stellar Core can be controlled using a robust CLI.

📄️ Advanced

This page contains information that is useful to know but that should not stop somebody from running a node.