Running a PoL Prover Client

Steps to run a PoL Prover Client

Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure you have the following

• Docker (version 23.0.0 or above, refer: https://docs.docker.com/desktop/install/linux-install/)

• Instance comparable to a t2 micro (1 vcpu, 1GB RAM and 5GB harddisk), though we recommend 2 cores, 4 GB RAM and 10 GB of storage.

Running your Prover client

There are two aspects in setting up the prover,

• Registration: so the challengers are aware of it

• Running: so the challengers can engage with it

Here's how to get the provers successfully running

Key Points to consider before proceeding...

1. Ports to be opened if using public IP:

Incoming ports to be opened (TCP & UDP ):

11112
22223
33334
33335
33336
44445
44446
44447
55556

Outgoing ports: Allow all

Setting up the Prover

You can provide the private key (for example, generated from Metamask) which will be used by the Witnesschain's PoL Prover client.

Use ECDSA Keypairs

1. Store the prover's private key in the file (Make sure you keep track of the file name and its location, as it would be refered later)

   echo "YOUR_PROVER_PRIVATE_KEY" > my_prover_private.key

2. Prepare a configuration file my_prover_config.json with the following entries

   {
     "claims": {
   
       "latitude": 37.015,
       "longitude": -79.039,
   
       "country": "US",
       "region": "Virginia",
       "city": "Ashburn",
       "radius": 1000
     },
     "projectName": "My-DEPIN-Project-Name",
   
     "walletPublicKey": {
       "ethereum": "YOUR_ETH_ADDRESS_FOR_REWARDS"
     },
     "maxChallengesPerDay": 100,
     "havePublicIPv4Address": false,
     "havePublicIPv6Address": false,
     
     "havePrivateIPv4Address": false,
     "havePrivateIPv6Address": false,
     
     "saveResultsInDatabase": false
   }

   Note:

   1. The fields country, region, city, radius (in meters) are optional.

   2. walletPublicKey.ethereum is the wallet addresses where your rewards go.

   3. havePublicIPv4Address (and havePublicIPv6Address) set them to true if you have a public IPv4 (or IPv6)

   4. havePrivateIPv4Address (and havePrivateIPv6Address) set them to true if you want to force the use of private IP

   5. saveResultsInDatabase saves the login, session, and challenge related data in a .sqlite file within the container

3. Once you have the config.json ready, the prover client can be started with

   docker run -d \
     --network=host \
     --name pol-prover \
     -v ./my_prover_config.json:/app/dart/bin/pol/config/prover.json \
     -v ./my_prover_private.key:/root/.config/ethereum/private.key \
     witnesschain/pol-prover:0.3.4-alpha

   Explanation:

   • docker run -d: Runs the container in detached mode (in the background).

   • --network=host
     Uses the host's network stack.

   • --name pol-prover
     Names the container as 'pol-prover'.

   • -v ./my_prover_config.json:/app/dart/bin/pol/config/prover.json 
     Mounts your local config file into the container at the specified path.

   • -v ./my_prover_private.key:/root/.config/ethereum/provate.key 
     Mounts your local private key file folder into the container at the specified path.

   • witnesschain/pol-prover: The name of the Docker image to run.

   you can verify that the prover is running by looking at the container status

   docker ps 

Now the prover is running successfully but not yet registered, you may find the logs stating the same. The prover will function as intended as soon as registration is done.

Registering the Prover

You can register the prover easily with the help of our registration cli, to do so

1. Download our witness-cli

   curl -sSfL https://witnesschain-com.github.io/install-dcl-cli | bash

   Follow the steps as directed in the output of the script to add the CLI to the shell profile to be able to use the CLI from anywhere.

2. Prepare the config (prover registration config), (The above command also downloads a template which you can refer to) make sure you set the prover_private_keys to the one you provided to the client (Setting the prover Step 2)

3. Run the following command for registration

   witness-cli registerProver --config-file <path-to-prover-registration-config.json>

Post Setup

Once the setting up and registration is successful, you can check the logs from the prover client ready for challenges. (docker logs pol-prover). Congratulations, you are now a part of our DePIN family!

We publish images (x86 & arm64) with the tag latest and by the git tag, the latest will always point to the new and up to date image. In order to pull the latest image, make sure you don't have an older release of latest to avoid using cached images.

You can remove the older images by

docker rmi witnesschain/pol-prover

Troubleshooting

As the only prerequisite is docker, make sure you are running atleast version 23.0.0 or above for the commands mentioned in the doc to work. The days might be rainy or snowy, but we've got umbrellas and sweaters! Join our Discord or Telegram—we're happy to help. :D