Hey fellow Ants,

I've seen a few posts around here #1 and #2 about how to set up bookkeeping nodes and from what I read in the Antshares documentation it was unclear. So I've put together my own method on how to get it set up if you are living in a Western country without a Baidu account. This approach uses Docker and is suited for MacOS systems, but perhaps I can make another tutorial for other systems (Linux, Windows, etc.) if people find this helpful.

Official documentation for setting up an Antshares bookkeeping node can be found here:

https://github.com/AntShares/AntShares/wiki/Bookkeeping-Node-Deployment

Finished example

The first thing you have to do is download Docker for Mac here, I would recommend directly using the Wizard setup manager instead of following the official documentation through Terminal-based setup. This will configure the environment variables and paths to Docker commands properly.

The second thing you will need to do is go to Baidu here and download docker_image_antsharesdaemon.tar

This will be used later on in the process but it's good to have the files upfront. The way I was able to download it without a Baidu account is to download it using Google Chrome's mobile responsive UI by hitting Cmd Shift C and clicking the mobile device icon. This should make the screen mobile responsive (if it doesn't click refresh) and allow you to download the file without a Baidu account.

Once you have the file downloaded, open up Terminal and setup your working directory.

For example, use the command

mkdir -p ~src/antshares/node
cd src/antshares/node

In this file directory you should place the docker_image_antsharesdaemon.tar that was downloaded earlier.

Next we are going to load Docker using the downloaded tar file.

sudo docker load < docker_image_antsharesdaemon.tar

And run

sudo docker run -it -p 10332:10332 -p 10333:10333 antshares/antsharesdaemon

This should get you set up with a RPC to Antshares Daemon.

Next we want to change our directory to the Antshares Daemon itself

cd /home/antshares/AntSharesDaemon

Here you can edit the protocol.json and config.json to your own specifications if you want.

Next initiate bookkeeping node by dotnet and enable RPC service

dotnet AntSharesDaemon.dll /rpc

The one part that wasn't clear in the official documentation was how to proceed once you're actually running the node. So I will cover that next.

Once you have the node running you can type 'help' to get a list of commands. For example, to create a wallet you would type in the following command (make a note of the public key and address, you can use these to export the private key and send ANS to the address directly)

ant>create wallet .\\

It will prompt you for a password twice (this is you wallet password) and set up a new wallet at the base directory. Now to open the wallet you do the following:

ant>open wallet .\\

Once you have a the wallet open you can start the node using the command:

ant>start consensus

Hope you guys and gals find this useful, if there are any clarifications I will make edits to be more clear. Also any tips are appreciated :)

ANS address: AdewwzCuZUGrbJEt8fC2YkY1opJrP5Nug1

ETH address: 0x5cc2f1a857351ede1b92bc625c2a427de579dfd1

-V