How to Setup a Full Litecoin Node on a Raspberry Pi 3

Published in

The Litecoin School of Crypto

6 min readOct 22, 2017

The Easy Step-By-Step Guide for Windows/Linux/Mac

The purpose of this guide is to help facilitate the support of a healthy Litecoin Network in a cost efficient way. The more full nodes there are distributed throughout the world, the less the Litecoin Network is prone to attack.

-Ecurrencyhodler

Quick Disclaimer: This work is the compilation of other guides. At the end of this walk through, I give credit to the authors of the outdated guides I based my work on. Also in Part 2 of my guide, I will provide you an .img of the final product of this guide in case you want to create a litecoin node in the easiest and quickest way possible.

If you want to be lazy and do not want to mess with the terminal and all that nerd stuff, click here to check the Easiest Way Possible to set a Litecoin Node Plug&Play.

What you will need:

Raspberry (duuuh)
A at least 8gb micro sd (I highly stupidly recommend you to use a 32gb)
A power supply (micro usb cable)
An HDMI cable or a HDMI to VGA adapter
Keyboard and mouse
Internet
A copy of the latest Raspdebian OS (https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/)
Win32Disk (https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/) (Only if you are using Windows)
If you want to do it on your own because #YOLO here is the link to all the Litecoin clients : https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/branches

Windows:

I am going to assume you already downloaded and installed Win32Disk and you already downloaded the latest Raspbian OS Image. The first step is to create a bootable microsd with Raspbian on it where you will be running the node.
Open Win32Disk, select the Device that you will be using (don’t worry about formatting, it will be done here automatically), and then select the .img you downloaded. It has to look something similar to this:

Once you have configured as above, click on “Write”, and be patient. It might take a while.

Linux:

1. Press CTRL+ALT+T to open a terminal window or alternatively, open the terminal your way, next you are going to write:

Lsblk

This will show all the current partitions and drives, look for your microsd here always by looking at the gigabite size that the system is showing, if your micro sd has multiple partitions, you can see your drive name by removing the last number, for example you might get that your drive name is /dev/sda1, this means that the drive name is sda and the number 1 represents the number of the partition.

2. Knowing this, you will type now:

sudo dd if=/location/of/the/img/file.img of=/dev/sdX

And again just wait until this finishes and you are set to go!

Mac:

Go to your applications folder, then click on utilities and click on Disk Utility.

1. Now mount the Raspbian.img file either by double cliking it, or by right clicking on it and open with disk utilities.

2. On the Disk Utility application select the .IMG file from the left panel and go to “Restore”, on the target field select and drag to it the micro sd from your left panel as well. Then click on the restore button. Just wait until it completes.

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3. Once you have successfully wrote the .img to the micro sd, it’s the time to boot your Raspberry. Insert it in its slot and plug it into your monitor and the wall. The system will autostart and it will reboot itself.

OPTIONAL STEP: Change the Keyboard Layout to your computer’s Keyboard. To do this go to the Start Menu >Preferences >Mouse and Keyboard > Keyboard > Layout and select the one that works the best for you.

4. The first step to do is to increase the SWAP partition. To do this, press CRTL+ALT+T and a Terminal Window will open. Type in the following code:

sudo nano /etc/dphys-swapfile

Now change the Value that reads CONFIG_SWAPSIZE=100 to CONFIG_SWAPSIZE=1000

Press CTRL+O then hit Enter to confirm and finally CRTL + X to exit.

After that now type

sudo dphys-swapfile setup

and then

sudo dphys-swapfile swapon

5. Next step is to get everything ready to download the Litecoin client. To do this connect to your internet either via WIFI or ethernet.

6. Once you are connected you are going to type this (copy-paste it, it’s ok to be lazy):

sudo apt-get install git build-essential libtool autotools-dev automake pkg-config libssl-dev libevent-dev bsdmainutils libboost-system-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-chrono-dev libboost-program-options-dev libboost-test-dev libboost-thread-dev libminiupnpc-dev libzmq3-dev jq

UPDATE: type “sudo apt-get update” after step 6 just to avoid possible future errors.

Let it finish its thing and in the meanwhile, check what is the latest Litecoin client version. At the moment of writing this guide (October 2017), the latest is 0.16

Check the version here: https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/branches

7. Now that you know what litecoin version is the most current, type:

cd ~
git clone -b 0.16 https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin.git

Wait again until it finishes

Disclaimer: I am not going to go through how to get wallet capabilities since this is supposed to be the simplest guide possible.

8. Time to install Litecoin!

Copy-paste the following or type it like an old man

cd litecoin

If that does not work because life hates you, try:

cd /home/pi/litecoin

Now type:

./autogen.sh

Once again, wait until it finishes. It should take about 3 minutes to complete

9. We are almost done here. Just a few more steps! Now type (don’t lie, you are copy-pasting this, you liar)

./configure CXXFLAGS="--param ggc-min-expand=1 --param ggc-min-heapsize=32768" --enable-cxx --without-gui --disable-shared --with-pic --enable-upnp-default --disable-wallet

Give it a minute or two to complete.

10. And here is where all the years of practice come in hand, type:

make check

It will take a long time (like how long it takes yo mamma to get out of bed)

If you get an error here, it means you did something wrong, and your life sucks, but no worries we can fix that, just start back from step 6 and move forward. Your life will still suck, but your installation should work.