Today, I’m teaching you how to run your own Monero full node, to help you stay more private and secure, and help the blockchain become stronger and more robust against attacks.

Requirements

  • A Computer - You can host a full node on pretty much anything as long as it has a fast internet connection and a decent amount of storage space for the blockchain, which grows in size every day. I am choosing to host my node in the cloud with a VPS.

  • Linux distro of your choice. - You can run this on Windows or Mac as well but I find it easier to run a dedicated full node on Linux, this tutorial is for Linux based Operating Systems.

  • Some command line experience.

Have your system ready? Good, lets get started!

Install updates

First things first we need to update our systems to be sure we have the latest security updates.

On Debian based distros do:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

On Arch based distros:

sudo pacman -Syu

For other package managers read your distros documentation.

Downloading MoneroCLI

The Monero Command Line wallet allows us to create our own monero wallet and run a monero node with monerod. The wallet can be used later if we wanted to start mining on our node.

  • Go to the Monero website and download the latest version.

    If you are on Linux you can copy the link and download it with wget:

wget https://downloads.getmonero.org/cli/linux64
  • Extract the archive
tar -xvzf monero-linux-x64-*

Running the daemon

For this tutorial in order to keep it simple I’m going to be using screen to run the daemon in the background. I find screen simple and easy to use but there are far better ways of running and automating it so that it can run at startup with systemd, but that’s not what we are doing today.

Start a screen session with

screen -S monero

make sure you are in the directory that we extracted before and then run

./monerod

Perfect, we have the monero dameon running, we need to let it sync up with the blockchain before it can become useful. This will take a while. It took half a day for mine to sync up. To exit the screen session you need to press the Ctrl, A, And D keys together (Ctrl+a+d). This will take you back to your main session.

Once your node syncs up it will be ready to be used by other people in the network. For a more in depth tutorial I’d recommend going to this site. It includes more advanced stuff like configuring it to use tor, using systemd scripts, and hardening the node with UFW.

Thanks for reading.