Once you have initiad installed and created the initiad.service file, you can now proceed to starting your node.

Configuring Node Network Settings

Initialization

Before you can start your node, you need to initialize it. This will create a default genesis.json and other important files.

To do so, run the following command:

initiad init [moniker] --chain-id [chain-id]

where:

  • moniker is the human readable name of your node
  • chain-id is the id of the chain you are joining. This can be found in the Networks section of the docs

Note that the moniker field here is the name of the node itself and does not apply to the validator name/moniker. The validator name/moniker is set when you create your validator and is used to identify your validator on the network.

When the init command is run, a ~/.initia/config/priv_validator_key.json file will be created. This file contains the private key to your validator and is necessary to be able to recover the node in case of hardware or other failure. It is important to keep this file secure and never share it with anyone. Back up this file somewhere safe and secure.

Replacing Genesis File

Once the node is initialized, we then need to replace the generated genesis.json file with the one for the network you are joining.

To do this, we need to download the genesis.json file for the network you are joining and replace the one in the ~/.initia/config/ directory.

Refer to the Networks section of the docs to find the genesis-url for the network you are joining.

Configuring Peers and Gas Prices

To connect to the network, we need to define a set of seed and/or peer nodes for our node to sync block and transaction data. Additionally, we must define the correct prices for the network to enable our node to validate transactions correctly.

Updating Address Book

We need to update the address book for the network we are joining.

To do this, run the following command: