Start Running your BEACON Today

Follow the steps below to set up and run your Blockcast BEACON Docker image:

1. Make sure you have Docker installed and running in the background

2. Retrieve the Blockcast Beacon Docker Image

   1. Download the Blockcast BEACON docker compose file from our git repo.

   2. Or run git clone https://github.com/Blockcast/beacon-docker-compose.git

3. Launch and start running Blockcast Beacon

   1. Start running your Blockcast BEACON with command docker compose up

4. Generate hardware and challenge key

   1. While BEACON client is up, in a separate window

      1. run docker compose exec blockcastd blockcastd init

      2. It would generate an output that contains your device's Hardware ID, Challenge Key and a Registration URL:

         1. 

      3. Note:

         1. Hardware ID is a unique public identifier for your device.

         2. Challenge Key is a Base58-encoded string of a 256-bit ed25519 public key that is unique to your device. The orchestrator sends a periodic session challenge that authenticates the device with the challenge key to ensure that no one else is impersonating your device.

         3. Backup your private key (in ~${HOME}/certs/gateway.key)and keep it safe, otherwise you will lose the ability to prove ownership of this device.

5. Register your docker instance on the web portal

   1. Go to our web portal https://app.blockcast.network/ and log in/register

   2. Copy and paste the Registration URL from the console output with your pre-filled Hardware ID and Challenge Key into your browser, OR

   3. Go to Manage Nodes page, press “Register Node” button, and manually enter your keys in the portal registration flow

      1. 

      2. 

   4. You will need to enable location access from your browser

      1. Here is how to enable it on Chrome. If you are using other browser, it might look different.

         1. 

6. Confirm your instance is online and healthy

   1. If your node is registered successfully and running, your node should show Healthy status in a few minutes in the node list table on the /manage-nodes page.

   2. Clicking on the node entry in the node list table lands you onto the node details page, you should be able to see the uptime, connectivity, rewards info of that particular node. The nodes need to be online for 6 hours in order for the first connectivity test to run. The first batch of rewards does not kick in until 24 hours of being continuously online.