Quickstart

This page has instructions to set up a single stand-alone BigchainDB node for learning or experimenting. Instructions for other cases are elsewhere. We will assume you’re using Ubuntu 16.04 or similar. If you’re not using Linux, then you might try running BigchainDB with Docker.

A. Install MongoDB as the database backend. (There are other options but you can ignore them for now.)

Install MongoDB Server 3.4+

B. To run MongoDB with default database path i.e. /data/db, open a Terminal and run the following command:

$ sudo mkdir -p /data/db

C. Assign rwx(read/write/execute) permissions to the user for default database directory:

$ sudo chmod -R 700 /data/db

D. Run MongoDB:

$ sudo mongod --replSet=bigchain-rs

E. Ubuntu 16.04 already has Python 3.5, so you don’t need to install it, but you do need to install some other things:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install g++ python3-dev libffi-dev build-essential libssl-dev

F. Get the latest version of pip and setuptools:

$ sudo apt-get install python3-pip
$ sudo pip3 install --upgrade pip setuptools

G. Install the bigchaindb Python package from PyPI:

$ sudo pip3 install bigchaindb

In case you are having problems with installation or package/module versioning, please upgrade the relevant packages on your host by running one the following commands:

$ sudo pip3 install [packageName]==[packageVersion]

OR

$ sudo pip3 install [packageName] --upgrade

H. Configure BigchainDB Server:

$ bigchaindb -y configure mongodb

I. Run BigchainDB Server:

$ bigchaindb start

You now have a running BigchainDB Server and can post transactions to it. One way to do that is to use the BigchainDB Python Driver.

Install the BigchainDB Python Driver (link)