BigchainDB

Documentation

Documentation is available at https://bigchaindb.readthedocs.org/

Getting started

Install RethinkDB

On Ubuntu

# install rethinkdb https://rethinkdb.com/docs/install/ubuntu/
$ source /etc/lsb-release && echo "deb http://download.rethinkdb.com/apt $DISTRIB_CODENAME main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rethinkdb.list
$ wget -qO- http://download.rethinkdb.com/apt/pubkey.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install rethinkdb

# start rethinkdb
$ rethinkdb

On other platforms

To install RethinkDB on other platform, please refer to the official documentation.

Install BigchainDB

$ pip install bigchaindb

Running BigchainDB

Currently BigchainDB only supports Python 3.4+

Start the main process. If it's the first time bigchaindb will generate a default configuration file for you.

$ bigchaindb start

Generate some tests transactions:

$ bigchaindb-benchmark load # add '-m' if you want to use all your cores

To know more about the bigchain command run

$ bigchaindb -h

Importing BigchainDB from the interpreter (python/ipython)

Make sure your rethinkdb process is running.

>>> from bigchaindb import Bigchain
>>> b = Bigchain()
>>> b.me
'2B8C8PJxhycFzn4wncRhBNmMWwE5Frr9nLBUa1dGGxj5W'

Configuration

BigchainDB creates a default configuration file on $HOME/.bigchaindb on the first run.

$ bigchaindb show-config

Testing

$ py.test -v

Monitoring

BigchainDB uses statsd for monitoring. To fully take advantage of this functionality requires some additional infrastructure: an agent to listen for metrics (e.g. telegraf), a time-series database (e.g. influxdb, and a frontend to display analytics (e.g. Grafana).

For ease of use, we've provided a docker compose file that sets up all these services for testing. Simply run in the BigchainDB directory:

$ docker-compose -f docker-compose-monitor.yml build
$ docker-compose -f docker-compose-monitor.yml up

and point a browser tab to http://localhost:3000/dashboard/script/bigchaindb_dashboard.js. Login and password are admin by default. If BigchainDB is running and processing transactions, you should see analytics—if not, start BigchainDB as above, and refresh the page after a few seconds.

If you're not interested in monitoring, don't worry: BigchainDB will function just fine without any monitoring setup.

Feel free to modify the custom Grafana dashboard to your liking!