Tutorial — How to install a node on the Aptos network for beginners

Published in

Coinmonks

6 min readMay 1, 2022

Finally, this tutorial will show you how to install a full node on the aptos network.
This tutorial is really made for beginners, everything is explained from the beginning to the end without leaving any grey areas.

Who am I

I am passionate about the world of blockchain and I would like to share my passion and research with you through my articles in giving you my perception and opening new doors to very early crypto projects.

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Introduction to Aptos Labs

Aptos is a new, independent project to fulfill our vision of delivering the safest and most production-ready blockchain in the world.

Website

Discord

You can also find the tutorial in video format here

Part 01: How order and configure your VPS server in 2 minutes

Before installing the node you need to rent a VPS server
The advantages of VPS are that they have high availability and are easy to configure.
Of course I’ll explain how to rent a VPS server at a lower cost and especially how to configure it in less than 2 minutes.

Let’s go…

Order your VPS on Contabo by clicking here.

To be completely transparent with you this is an affiliate link that you can use even if you already have an account on Contabo. Thank you in advance.

Now (as of June 1st) you can ask for 5 dollar refund once if you go through affiliate link. For that you just need to fill this online form after you buy your VPS. If needed everything is explained in this article.

**1 month for the rental period, you can extend later if needed**

**Do not change anything for the geolocation of your VPS server**

**Generate your passport and copy and paste it now into a notepad that will be saved on your computer**

**Don’t touch anything and click on “NEXT”**

**If you are new to Contabo and you are an individual, do not touch anything**

**Fill in the fields with your personal data**

**Finish filling in the last fields with your personal information and click on Next button to proceed to payment**

Once you have finished paying for your order. You will receive a first email.

**Corresponding to the status of your order**

And approximately 15 minutes later you will receive a second email with all the information to connect to your VPS.

**The login details to connect on your VPS**

Part 02: How to connect to your VPS

With MacOS:

MacOS includes already a SSH command. To connect via SSH from this operating system, first open the Terminal window. You can find this tool by going to “ Application->Utilities->Terminal”.

With Windows : I invite you to download Putty by clicking “here” (You can directly download the installation file with this link).

This is the file illustrated in the image above, if you wish to download another one click on this “**link**”

Now open the .exe file to start the installation of Putty and follow the instructions to complete the installation. At the end of the installation you will have a shortcut to Putty on your desktop.

Launch Putty, a new window will open in which you will enter the IP address of your VPS and click on Open

The interface of your server will open and will ask you for the login details.

Now you are finally on your server (see image below):

Tip 1: To paste any command that you have already copied above, just right-click where you want to paste the command

Tip 2: Only paste or write a command when your vps server allows it. As soon as “root@vmxxxxxxxxx: “is visible you can write otherwise you have to wait

**In this example you have permission to write or paste a command**

Now you are ready to get serious. You just have to paste one by one the commands that I put at your disposal below. Take your time and make sure you have taken the order from start to finish.
To help you I have put some screenshots showing the result you should get each time you paste a command.

Best of luck…

Part 03: Node installation

Run FullNode + generate a unique static node identity with one-line script. Tested on Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS.

wget -q -O aptos.sh https://api.zvalid.com/aptos.sh && chmod +x aptos.sh && sudo /bin/bash aptos.sh

If there was a new release update you can use same one-line script to renew your node. Your private key will stay the same!

Now you have run the previous command.

Check that your node has synchronised with the Aptos blockchain with the following command:

curl 127.0.0.1:9101/metrics 2> /dev/null | grep aptos_state_sync_version                                                                                 | grep type

If you have used our guide to setup the Aptos FullNode and started having synchronisation problems then you can use this one-line script to automatically update the list of peers. After execute script below your node will be automatically restarted. You can execute following script at any point of time. Eventually i will add more peers to the list:

wget -q -O aptos_renew_seeds.sh https://api.zvalid.com/aptos_renew_seeds.sh && chmod +x aptos_renew_seeds.sh && sudo /bin/bash aptos_renew_seeds.sh

You can concretely check the status of your node by following this “link”.

Part04: Declaration of your node on discord

In this last part we will see how we declare your node on the discord.

To do this you must go to the discord in the advertise fullnode section and fill in your upstreem peer details:

To display the details of your peer_id, public_key and private_key, you can use this one-line script to display, vous poouvez utliser la commande ci-dessous:

wget -q -O aptos_identity.sh https://api.zvalid.com/aptos_identity.sh && chmod +x aptos_identity.sh && sudo /bin/bash aptos_identity.sh

So there you have it everyone, you’ve finally finished installing your and declaring yourselves, congratulations to you!

Thank you for your time, if you like this kind of content, don’t hesitate to check my other articles and my videos on youtube channel.