Run the node

Once the node is configured and, ideally, restored from a snapshot, it is ready for its first start. The sections below cover starting and stopping it, following its logs and telling when it has caught up with the chain.

Start the node

If you set up the service described in Cosmovisor, start it and check its status:

sudo systemctl start cosmovisor
sudo systemctl status cosmovisor

Without Cosmovisor, start the node in the foreground:

nolusd start

For a long-running node without Cosmovisor, run nolusd start from your own systemd unit instead of a terminal. Either way, nolusd applies its recommended consensus config on every start unless you pass --reject-config-defaults.

Stop the node

nolusd has no stop command, so you stop the service or the foreground process instead:

sudo systemctl stop cosmovisor   # Cosmovisor service
# or press Ctrl+C in the terminal running nolusd start

Follow the logs

The Cosmovisor service writes to the systemd journal, which you can follow with this command:

journalctl -u cosmovisor -f

Check the sync status

After it starts, the node first replays every block between its starting height and the chain tip. Because the Nolus snapshot is published weekly, a node restored from it can start up to a week behind, and the catch-up time depends on that gap and on your hardware. The node's status shows how far it has come:

curl -s http://localhost:26657/status | jq '.result.sync_info | {latest_block_height, catching_up}'

The catching_up field tells you which of two states the node is in:

• catching_up: true means the node is still syncing. To see how far it has to go, compare latest_block_height with the network height that curl -s https://rpc.nolus.network/status | jq -r .result.sync_info.latest_block_height returns.
• catching_up: false means the node is at the tip and ready. To run it as a validator, continue with Run a validator.

Local endpoints

A running node serves the following endpoints, each enabled in the file and section shown:

Open the P2P port to the internet so that other nodes can reach yours, and keep RPC, REST and gRPC private unless you mean to serve them.