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Quorum Examples

This section details couple of setup examples for Quorum

Current examples include:

  • 7nodes: Starts up a fully-functioning Quorum environment consisting of 7 independent nodes. From this example one can test consensus, privacy, and all the expected functionality of an Ethereum platform.
  • 5nodesRTGS: [Note: This links to an external repo which you will need to clone, thanks to @rsarres for this contribution!] Starts up a set of 5 nodes that simulates a Real-time Gross Setlement environment with 3 banks, one regulator (typically a central bank) and an observer that cannot access the private data.

The easiest way to get started with running the examples is to use the vagrant environment (see below).

Important note: Any account/encryption keys contained in this repository are for demonstration and testing purposes only. Before running a real environment, you should generate new ones using Geth’s account tool and the --generate-keys option for Constellation (or -keygen option for Tessera).

Getting Started

The 7nodes example can be run in three ways:

  1. By running a preconfigured Vagrant environment which comes complete with Quorum, Constellation, Tessera and the 7nodes example (works on any machine).
  2. By running docker-compose against a preconfigured compose file (example from the quorum-examples repo) which starts 7nodes example (tested on Windows 10, macOS Mojave & Ubuntu 18.04).
  3. By downloading and locally running Quorum, Tessera and the examples (requires an Ubuntu-based/macOS machine; note that Constellation does not support running locally)

Setting up Vagrant

  1. Install VirtualBox
  2. Install Vagrant

  3. Download and start the Vagrant instance (note: running vagrant up takes approx 5 mins):

    git clone https://github.com/jpmorganchase/quorum-examples
cd quorum-examples
vagrant up
vagrant ssh

  4. To shutdown the Vagrant instance, run vagrant suspend. To delete it, run vagrant destroy. To start from scratch, run vagrant up after destroying the instance.

Troubleshooting Vagrant

  • If you are behind a proxy server, please see https://github.com/jpmorganchase/quorum/issues/23.
  • If you are using macOS and get an error saying that the ubuntu/xenial64 image doesn’t exist, please run sudo rm -r /opt/vagrant/embedded/bin/curl. This is usually due to issues with the version of curl bundled with Vagrant.
  • If you receive the error default: cp: cannot open '/path/to/geth.ipc' for reading: Operation not supported after running vagrant up, run ./raft-init.sh within the 7nodes directory on your local machine. This will remove temporary files created after running 7nodes locally and will enable vagrant up to execute correctly.

Troubleshooting Vagrant: Memory usage

  • The Vagrant instance is allocated 6 GB of memory. This is defined in the Vagrantfile, v.memory = 6144. This has been deemed a suitable value to allow the VM and examples to run as expected. The memory allocation can be changed by updating this value and running vagrant reload to apply the change.

  • If the machine you are using has less than 8 GB memory you will likely encounter system issues such as slow down and unresponsiveness when starting the Vagrant instance as your machine will not have the capacity to run the VM. There are several steps that can be taken to overcome this:

    1. Shutdown any running processes that are not required
    2. If running the 7nodes example, reduce the number of nodes started up. See the 7nodes: Reducing the number of nodes for info on how to do this.
    3. Set up and run the examples locally. Running locally reduces the load on your memory compared to running in Vagrant.

Setting up Docker

  1. Install Docker (https://www.docker.com/get-started)
    • If your Docker distribution does not contain docker-compose, follow this to install Docker Compose
    • Make sure your Docker daemon has at least 4G memory
    • Required Docker Engine 18.02.0+ and Docker Compose 1.21+
  2. Download and run docker-compose 
    git clone https://github.com/jpmorganchase/quorum-examples
cd quorum-examples
docker-compose up -d
  3. By default, Quorum Network is created using Tessera transaction manager and Istanbul BFT consensus. If you wish to change consensus configuration to Raft, set the environment variable QUORUM_CONSENSUS=raft before running docker-compose 
    QUORUM_CONSENSUS=raft docker-compose up -d
  4. Run docker ps to verify that all quorum-examples containers (7 nodes and 7 tx managers) are healthy
  5. Note: to run the 7nodes demo, use the following snippet to open geth Javascript console to a desired node (using container name from docker ps) and send a private transaction 
    $ docker exec -it quorum-examples_node1_1 geth attach /qdata/dd/geth.ipc
Welcome to the Geth JavaScript console!

instance: Geth/node1-istanbul/v1.7.2-stable/linux-amd64/go1.9.7
coinbase: 0xd8dba507e85f116b1f7e231ca8525fc9008a6966
at block: 70 (Thu, 18 Oct 2018 14:49:47 UTC)
 datadir: /qdata/dd
 modules: admin:1.0 debug:1.0 eth:1.0 istanbul:1.0 miner:1.0 net:1.0 personal:1.0 rpc:1.0 txpool:1.0 web3:1.0

> loadScript('/examples/private-contract.js')
  6. Shutdown Quorum Network 
    docker-compose down

Troubleshooting Docker

  1. Docker is frozen
    • Check if your Docker daemon is allocated enough memory (minimum 4G)
  2. Tessera is crashed due to missing file/directory
    • This is due to the location of quorum-examples folder is not shared
    • Please refer to Docker documentation for more details:
  3. If you run Docker inside Docker, make sure to run the container with --privileged

Setting up locally

Info

This is only possible with Tessera. Constellation is not supported when running the examples locally. To use Constellation, the examples must be run in Vagrant.

  1. Install Golang

  2. Download and build Quorum:

    git clone https://github.com/jpmorganchase/quorum
cd quorum
make
GETHDIR=`pwd`; export PATH=$GETHDIR/build/bin:$PATH
cd ..

  3. Download and build Tessera (see README for build options)

    git clone https://github.com/jpmorganchase/tessera.git
cd tessera
mvn install

  4. Download quorum-examples 

    git clone https://github.com/jpmorganchase/quorum-examples

Running the 7nodes example

Shell scripts are included in the examples to make it simple to configure the network and start submitting transactions.

All logs and temporary data are written to the qdata folder.

Using Raft consensus

  1. Navigate to the 7nodes example, configure the Quorum nodes and initialize accounts & keystores: 
    cd path/to/7nodes
./raft-init.sh

  2. Start the Quorum and privacy manager nodes (Constellation or Tessera):

    • If running in Vagrant: 

      ./raft-start.sh
      By default, Constellation will be used as the privacy manager. To use Tessera run the following: 
      ./raft-start.sh tessera
      By default, raft-start.sh will look in /home/vagrant/tessera/tessera-app/target/tessera-app-{version}-app.jar for the Tessera jar.

    • If running locally with Tessera: 

      ./raft-start.sh tessera --tesseraOptions "--tesseraJar /path/to/tessera-app.jar"

      The Tessera jar location can also be specified by setting the environment variable TESSERA_JAR.

  3. You are now ready to start sending private/public transactions between the nodes

Using Istanbul BFT consensus

To run the example using Istanbul BFT consensus use the corresponding commands: 

istanbul-init.sh
istanbul-start.sh
istanbul-start.sh tessera
stop.sh

Using Clique POA consensus

To run the example using Clique POA consensus use the corresponding commands: 

clique-init.sh
clique-start.sh
clique-start.sh tessera
stop.sh

Next steps: Sending transactions

Some simple transaction contracts are included in quorum-examples to demonstrate the privacy features of Quorum. To learn how to use them see the 7nodes.