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Running a Validator

Validator Prerequisites

  • Basic compute resources (any cpu server)

Validator Installation​

1. Setup Validator CPU Server

Follow the steps in amd-cpus.md to setup your hardware for the validator virtual machine. We reccomend latitude m4.metal.medium boxes that you can easily upgrade from 24.04 to 25.04 ubuntu

2. Environment Setup

Create a .env file in the project directory:

### Required
HOTKEY_PHRASE="your hotkey phrase"
MONGO_USERNAME=
MONGO_PASSWORD=
VALIDATOR_IP="ipv4 address of the vali"

### Optional

# Sets a multiplier on all http connection timeouts
TIMEOUT_MULT=1

## Sends discord notifications for things like setting weights
# DISCORD_URL=

### Dev Variables (dont set unless needed)

## Netuid validator is running on. Useful for testnet
# NETUID=4

## Chain to connect to
# CHAIN_ENDPOINT=wss://entrypoint-finney.opentensor.ai:443

Note both mongo environment keys are keys you define and can be whatever you want. We suggest using the output of tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 </dev/urandom | head -c 24; echo. Run twice, and use one as the password and one as the username. These do not need to be double quoted in the .env file

3. Pull validator VM

Use tvm/install binary on the CPU server with the following arguments

  • --hotkey-phrase: Your validator Hotkey Phrase
  • --node-type: vali-cpu
  • --submit: Actually submit and download image
  • --service-url: http://tvm.targon.com
  • --vm-download-dir: location you want to download vm (i.e /vms/manifold)

4. Start the VM

Go to the vm-download-dir, and into the unzipped folder that is newly created. Run sudo launch_vm.sh to start the vm.

To stop the vim, use ps -aux | grep qemu followed by sudo kill -9 [puid], where puid is the second column of the output row prefixed by root.

5. Start the validator

To initalize the validator, first install targon-cli (see cli docs for installation) on the server hosting the vm and run targon-cli vali init [path to .env file]. This will prompt the user to confirm the passed environment file. This must be done on the server where the VM is running, or you must pass --ip with the ip of the server. This will start the validator with the environment variables passed.

Validator Monitoring and Maintenance​

Logs

To get logs, first you must get a list of the running containers using targon-cli vali containers. Then, you can view the logs of any of the containers using targon-cli vali logs --container [container name].

Updates

To update the validator running in the VM, either repull and re-init the VM, or run targon-cli vali update.