Running private Ethereum on Docker

2 min readJul 12, 2019

The Ethereum scene keeps growing with new technologies and tools built on top of it all the time.

Leveraging all those changes might be a hard task and the basics are quickly lost among the myriad of new acronyms and changes in the documentation.

This quick tutorial introduces eth-playground, a simple and straightforward project to run and monitor Ethereum nodes in a private Docker network.

The ultimate goal is not to mine Ether (which is really expensive nowadays) but to have your own DLT setup able to run smart contracts and experiments in an environment that aims to mimic a production Blockchain deployment.

Features

Eth-playground provides a handy CLI bash script (called cluster) to allow simple interaction with the nodes:

Login to the running containers, e.g. eth2 node: cluster login eth2
Geth console inside the running container, e.g. eth1: cluster geth eth1
Build, stop cluster: ./build.sh, cluster stop

Check the network status: cluster info

This command returns the URL and port where netstat is displaying the status of the geth nodes (the IP of the netstat node):

Netstat reporting the status of 3 nodes — ETh-netstat reports the status of all the nodes

Architecture

The architecture is very simple, fully built on a Docker network and provides the following basic structure:

a set of Ethereum private nodes (currently 3) running geth on a private chainID.
a bootnode node that allows peer discovery in the network when a new node is added.
a netstat node displaying the nodes status (each node reports using eth-net-intelligence-api).

The nodes connect to the bootnode node when bootstrapping to discover new peers and each one of them reports automatically its status to the netstat node.