Installing Bifrost

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Overview

This guide will show you how to compile and install bifrost into your operating system of choice, directly from the source code. It will enable you to interact with the Topl blockchain, including but not limited to sending/receiving transactions, minting/burning customizable assets, posting verifiable metadata into the blockchain, and so much more!

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Note

If you want to avoid compiling the binaries yourself, you can download the latest version of Bifrost from the links below:

There are newer source code available:

Bifrost can be built and run on Windows and MacOS, but we recommend that node operators use Linux to take advantage of associated performance advantages.

Prerequisites

To set up the components, you will need:

  • Windows, MacOS, or Linux for your operating system
  • A CPU with at least 2 cores (recommended 4)
  • 4GB of RAM (recommended RAM: 8GB) and at least 20GB of free disk space (Recommended 80GB of free disk space

Choose your Platform

Linux & MacOS

In this section, we will walk you through the process of downloading, compiling, and installing bifrost into your Linux-based or Mac-OS operating system.

Installing Operating System Dependencies

To download the source code and build it, you need the following packages and tools on your Linux system:

  • the version control system git
  • curl
  • unzip
  • zip
  • GraalVM compatible Java SDK (GraalVM 21+)
  • the SBT Scala Compiler (version 1.5.5 or above)
  • Java 11

In Redhat, Fedora, and Centos: 

sudo yum update -y
sudo yum install git curl unzip zip -y

For Debian/Ubuntu, use the following instead:

sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install git curl unzip zip -y

For MacOS, all necessary tools should be installed with the following packages and tools for your MacOS system:

  • Xcode - The Apple Development IDE and SDK/Tools
  • Xcode Command Line Tools, you can install it by typing xcode-select --install in the terminal.
  • Homebrew - The Missing Package Manager for MacOS (or Linux)

Installing GraalVM and SBT

The fastest way to install SBT and GraalVM is to use SDKMAN

Use the following command to install SDKMAN

curl -s "https://get.sdkman.io" | bash
source "$HOME/.sdkman/bin/sdkman-init.sh"

Please follow the instructions and provide the necessary input to the installer if required. Once complete, you should have SDKMAN installed to your system.

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Note

SDKMAN will try to detect your shell and add itself to the environment variables. Please restart your shell/terminal after installing SDKMAN

You can check if SDKMAN has been installed correctly by typing sdk version into the terminal. You should see something similar to the following:

sdkman 5.0.0+51

Install GraalVM'

  • Install Graalvm using SDKMAN
    sdk install java 21.1.0.r11-gr1

Install SBT

  • sbt is required to build Bifrost from source and may be installed by running the following commands
    sdk install sbt

Note that any version of sbt < 1.5.5 should be able to install and switch to the required version.

Finally, we check if we have the correct sbt and java versions installed.

Check sbt version: 

sbt sbtVersion

You should see something like this 

$ sbt 'inspect sbtVersion'
[info] Set current project to my_user (in build file:/Users/my_user/)
[info] Setting: java.lang.String = 0.11.1
[info] Description:
[info]  Provides the version of sbt.  This setting should be not be modified.
[info] Provided by:
[info]  */*:sbtVersion
[info] Defined at:
[info]  (sbt.Defaults) Defaults.scala:68
[info] Delegates:
[info]  *:sbtVersion
[info]  {.}/*:sbtVersion
[info]  */*:sbtVersion
[info] Related:
[info]  */*:sbtVersion

Check java version:

java --version

You should see something like this

java version "1.11.0_55"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_55-b13)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 24.55-b03, mixed mode)

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Important

Please confirm that the versions you have installed match the recommended versions above. If not, check if you have missed any of the previous steps.

Downloading and Compiling

First, download Bifrost from Github

git clone [email protected]:Topl/Bifrost.git
cd Bifrost
git fetch --all --recurse-submodules --tags

Switch the repository to the latest tagged commit:

git checkout tags/1.8.0

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Important

You can check the latest available version/tag by visiting the bifrost Github-Release page. At the time of writing this, the current version is 1.8.0.

Compiling the node

We can now build the Scala-based bifrost-node to produce executables. 

sbt compile

Congratulations, you have successfully installed Topl bifrost into your Linux or MacOS system! 🎉🎉🎉

Windows

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Important

Currently, the Windows installation guide is still in progress. In the meantime, we recommend using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) to get a Linux environment on top of Windows. Once installed, you can use the Linux guide to install and run bifrost within WSL.

Updated over 1 year ago

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