Starting the stack

Configure

Docker

First, ensure that your Docker client is up-to-date and that the DOCKER_DEFAULT_PLATFORM environment variable is properly set (within your ~/.bashrc or shell of choice) to your machine's architecture.

# Eg, for Apple-Silicon users:
export DOCKER_DEFAULT_PLATFORM=linux/amd64

Start the validator

This spins up a lightweight validator that effectively serves the purpose of testing program deployment and functionality by simulating a single-node blockchain environment locally.

This setup is much less resource intensive than running the Self-contained Arch Network and includes only the VM component needed to test business logic.

Note: If you are looking to work on core components of Arch Network or would like to understand how Arch validators communicate with one another, we recommend looking into the Self-contained Arch Network setup.

The following commands will assist you in provisioning the local validator. Simply start the validator to begin testing your program logic.

arch-cli validator start [options]

If everything pulls and builds correctly, you should see something resembling the following in your logs:

Welcome to the Arch Network CLI
  → Loading configuration from /Users/jr/Library/Application Support/arch-cli/config.toml
Starting the local validator...
Local validator started successfully!

To stop the validator, simply issue the corresponding stop command.

arch-cli validator stop

If everything stops correctly, you should something resembling the following in your logs:

Welcome to the Arch Network CLI
  → Loading configuration from /Users/jr/Library/Application Support/arch-cli/config.toml
Stopping the local validator...
Local validator stopped successfully!

Now that everything is configured and the local validator is up and running, it's time learn how to build, deploy and interact with a program.