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MWC - Build, Configuration, and Running

Supported Platforms

Longer term, most platforms will likely be supported to some extent. MWC's programming language rust has build targets for most platforms.

What's working so far:

  • Linux x86_64 and macOS [MWC + mining + development]
  • Windows 10 yet [MWC builds, some slowness but overall can work]

Requirements

  • rust: Install using rustup: https://rustup.rs
    • MWC currently does not support a minimum version of Rust, it is recommended to build using the latest version.
    • If rust is already installed, you can update to the latest version by running rustup update.
  • clang
  • ncurses and libs (ncurses, ncursesw5)
  • zlib libs (zlib1g-dev or zlib-devel)
  • pkg-config
  • libssl-dev
  • linux-headers (reported needed on Alpine linux)
  • llvm

For Debian-based distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc), all in one line (except Rust):

sh
apt install build-essential cmake git libgit2-dev clang libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev zlib1g-dev pkg-config libssl-dev llvm

For Macintosh:

sh
xcode-select --install
brew install pkg-config
brew install openssl
brew install llvm

Build steps

sh
git clone https://github.com/mwcproject/mwc-node
cd mwc-node
cargo build --release

MWC can also be built in debug mode (without the --release flag, but using the --debug or the --verbose flag) but this will render fast sync prohibitively slow due to the large overhead of cryptographic operations.

Build errors

See Troubleshooting

What was built?

A successful build gets you:

  • target/release/mwc - the main mwc binary

All data, configuration and log files created and used by mwc are located in the hidden ~/.mwc directory (under your user home directory) by default. You can modify all configuration values by editing the file ~/.mwc/main/mwc-server.toml.

It is also possible to have mwc create its data files in the current directory. To do this, run

sh
mwc server config

Which will generate a mwc-server.toml file in the current directory, pre-configured to use the current directory for all of its data. Running mwc from a directory that contains a mwc-server.toml file will use the values in that file instead of the default ~/.mwc/main/mwc-server.toml.

While testing, put the mwc binary on your path like this:

sh
export PATH=`pwd`/target/release:$PATH

assuming you are running from the root directory of your MWC installation.

You can then run mwc directly (try mwc help for more options).

Configuration

MWC attempts to run with sensible defaults, and can be further configured via the mwc-server.toml file. This file is generated by MWC on its first run, and contains documentation on each available option.

While it's recommended that you perform all MWC server configuration via mwc-server.toml, it's also possible to supply command line switches to MWC that override any settings in the file.

For help on mwc commands and their switches, try:

sh
mwc help
mwc server --help
mwc client --help

Docker

sh
docker build -t mwc -f etc/Dockerfile .

For floonet, use etc/Dockerfile.floonet instead

You can bind-mount your mwc cache to run inside the container.

sh
docker run -it -d -v $HOME/.mwc:/root/.mwc mwc

If you prefer to use a docker named volume, you can pass -v dotmwc:/root/.mwc instead. Using a named volume copies default configurations upon volume creation.

Cross-platform builds

Rust (cargo) can build mwc for many platforms, so in theory running mwc as a validating node on your low powered device might be possible. To cross-compile mwc on a x86 Linux platform and produce ARM binaries, say, for a Raspberry Pi.

Using mwc

The wiki page Wallet User Guide and linked pages have more information on what features we have, troubleshooting, etc.

Mining in MWC

Please note that all mining functions for MWC have moved into a separate, standalone package called mwc-miner. Once your MWC code node is up and running, you can start mining by building and running mwc-miner against your running MWC node.

For mwc-miner to be able to communicate with your MWC node, make sure that you have enable_stratum_server = true in your mwc-server.toml configuration file and you have a wallet listener running (mwc-wallet listen).

Released under the MIT License.