Skip to main content

SN4 Validator Setup

Validator Prerequisites

  • Basic compute resources (any AMD-SNP enabled CPU server)

Validator Installation​

1. Set Up the Validator CPU Server

Deploy on an AMD SEV-SNP enabled server. We recommend Latitude m4.metal.medium boxes running Ubuntu 26.04.

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 (don't set unless needed)

## Netuid the 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 values you define and can be anything you want. We suggest using the output of tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 </dev/urandom | head -c 24; echo — run it twice, and use one result as the username and the other as the password. These do not need to be double-quoted in the .env file.

3. Pull the Validator VM

Run the 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 the image
  • --service-url: http://tvm.targon.com
  • --vm-download-dir: Location to download the VM to (e.g. /vms/manifold)

4. Start the VM

Go to the VM download directory and enter the newly created (unzipped) folder, then start the VM:

sudo launch_vm.sh

To stop the VM, find the QEMU process ID and kill it:

ps -aux | grep qemu
sudo kill -9 [pid]

where [pid] is the second column of the output row that starts with root.

5. Start the Validator

To initialize the validator, first install sn4 on the server hosting the VM (see the CLI docs for installation), then run:

sn4 vali init [path to .env file]

You will be prompted to confirm the environment file before it is applied. This command must be run on the server where the VM is running; otherwise, pass --ip with the IP address of that server. Once confirmed, the validator starts with the provided environment variables.

Validator Monitoring and Maintenance​

Logs

First, list the running containers:

sn4 vali containers

Then view the logs of any container:

sn4 vali logs --container [container name]

Updates

To update the validator running in the VM, either re-pull and re-initialize the VM, or run:

sn4 vali update