Hosting a DHT bootstrap node

This guide will help you setup and maintain a LBRY DHT bootstrap node. Those nodes are important so people can join the network on first startup.

After finishing and checking that it works, if you want to add your node to the SDK bootstrap list just open a PR adding yourself to the conf file or an issue on the SDK repo.

Requirements

• Being reachable over UDP on the internet at some port
• 1GB of memory
• Docker or Python 3.7 (check pyenv if your Linux distribution doesn't offer that version)

Running directly from Docker

This is the easiest way to run and maintain your node. Just run:

docker run -d -p 4444:4444 lbry/dht-bootstrap:latest

Installing LBRY SDK from source

The most up-to-date guide for doing it will always be in the INSTALL.md file. Please refer to it if you run into trouble. Otherwise, this should be enough most of the time (assuming requirements are all there):

git clone https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-sdk.git
make install

Running a node from source

After installing, just:

python scripts/dht_node.py

Checking if it is working

From another machine with the SDK installed, run:

python scripts/dht_node.py --bootstrap_node your-server-domain-here.com:4444

After 10-20 seconds, you should see more than 0 peers on the log messages. If that is not the case, check firewall on the bootstrap node and see if it is reachable.