ABT Chain Node is a user-friendly application that can start/manage a forge node. It is currently a preview version. For MAC OSX and Ubuntu user, we build desktop edition to manage node start/stop automatically.

The most up to date build is :

For Chinese users:

For global users:

Because both Forge CLI and ABT Chain Node starts a node on your local machine, if you are already running a node with forge-cli, things may not go as expected when you start ABT Chain Node. For developers, we recommend using Forge CLI to manage your local node.

If you are OSX user, once you downloaded the dmg file and dragged it to application folder, when you try to run it for the first time, it will give you a warning like this:

Chain Node Warning

This is because the current preview version of the ABT Chain Node has not yet registered with Apple. You can find more information with this KB: https://support.apple.com/kb/ph25088?locale=en_US.

So don't worry about it for now. You can find the app in the finder, right click it and select "Open" from the menu:

Open Chain Node

Then click "Open" again in the popup window to allow it:

Allow Open Chain Node

Then ABT Chain Node shall be successfully opened like this:

Node Open

and wait a moment you will see the running node like this:

Node Normal

If you see node shows certain GraphQL error like this:

Node Error

don't panic, just click Command + R to refresh the page, then it shall work.

A newly started node will have just a few transactions, if you want to generate some transactions, you can start the simulator with integrated API playground:

Node Simulator

If you stuck...

If you stuck and got error like this:

Node error

It is highly likely that your osx lacks of the necessary tool chains. If you have homebrew in your system, open a terminal and run this command:

This is to install openssl and other tools for cryptographic related functions. If you don't have homebrew installed, please follow the first 3 steps in this doc: Install Forge on OSX.

Then rerun the ABTChainNode app. It should work. If not, please let us know. Note that OSX El Captain and lower version is not supported.

Features

Join a network

From application menu ("ABT Chain Node" next to the apple icon on top left corner), select "Join Another Network", then follow instructions to complete:

Join another network

Then click "Proceed" and input a network URL:

Input network url

Currently the choices are:

Note bromine runs with a nightly build so we can't guarantee it is always online.

Once you have provided the url, click "OK", your local data will be wiped out and after forge restart, your node will start syncing with remote node.

Because both Bromine and Titanium network have simulation traffic on them since these 2 chains was brought up, if you are joining these 2 networks, high CPU usage by your local node because it's in fast-sync mode to catch up with the network.

Reset chain state

From application menu, select "Reset Chain State", then follow instructions to complete.

Reset chain state

Once you click "Proceed", you will lose all existing data. You can then click "Quit" and start ABT Chain Node again to have a completely refresh node. If you didn't quit, the chain will follow the current configuration.

Please be aware that joining a new network / reset chain state means your local data will be wiped out. If you'd like to preserve your data, please back it up and restore it later. All the data generated by ABT chain node is stored in ~/.forge_desktop.