Mixnet Explorer

The Nym Network Explorer lets you explore the Nym network. We have open-sourced the explorer so that anyone can run an instance of it, further decentralising the network!

Prerequisites

• git

sudo apt update
sudo apt install git

Verify git is installed with:

git version
# Should return: git version X.Y.Z

• (Debian/Ubuntu) pkg-config, build-essential, libssl-dev, curl, jq

sudo apt update
sudo apt install pkg-config build-essential libssl-dev curl jq

• NodeJS (use nvm install to automatically install the correct version) and npm

• Rust & cargo >= 1.66

We recommend using the Rust shell script installer. Installing cargo from your package manager (e.g. apt) is not recommended as the packaged versions are usually too old.

If you really don’t want to use the shell script installer, the Rust installation docs contain instructions for many platforms.

Local Development

Complete the steps in the building nym section, before cd-ing into nym/explorer.

Start a development server with hot reloading running on http://localhost:3000 with the following commands from inside the explorer directory:

nvm install # install relevant nodejs and npm versions 
npm install
npm run start

eslint and prettier are already configured.

You can lint the code by running:

npm run lint

This command will only show linting errors and will not fix them!

To fix all linting errors automatically run:

npm run lint:fix

Please see the development docs in explorer/docs for more information on the structure and design of this app.

Deployment

Complete the steps in the building nym section, before cd-ing into nym/explorer.

The Network Explorer should be run on a machine with at least 4GB of RAM - the build process might fail if run on a less powerful machine.

Building the Explorer UI

Build the UI with these commands from within the explorer directory:

nvm install # install relevant nodejs and npm versions 
npm install
npm run build

The output will be in the dist directory.

This can then be either served directly from the nym directory, or from its own directory if you wish. See the template nginx config below for more on how to host this.

Building the Explorer API

The Explorer API was built in the previous step with cargo build.

Automating the explorer with systemd

You will most likely want to automate the Explorer-API restarting if your server reboots. Below is a systemd unit file to place at /etc/systemd/system/nym-explorer-api.service:

[Unit]
Description=Nym Explorer API (1.1.0)
StartLimitIntervalSec=350
StartLimitBurst=10

[Service]
User=nym
Type=simple
Environment="API_STATE_FILE=/home/nym/network-explorer/explorer-api-state.json"
Environment="GEO_IP_SERVICE_API_KEY=c69155d0-25f6-11ec-80bc-75e5dbd322c3"
ExecStart=explorer/api/location
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=30

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Proceed to start it with:

systemctl daemon-reload # to pickup the new unit file
systemctl enable nymd   # to enable the service
systemctl start nymd    # to actually start the service
journalctl -f           # to monitor system logs showing the service start

Installing and configuring nginx for HTTPS

Setup

Nginx is an open source software used for operating high-performance web servers. It allows us to set up reverse proxying on our validator server to improve performance and security.

Install nginx and allow the ‘Nginx Full’ rule in your firewall:

sudo ufw allow 'Nginx Full'

Check nginx is running via systemctl:

systemctl status nginx

Which should return:

● nginx.service - A high performance web server and a reverse proxy server
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/nginx.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (running) since Fri 2018-04-20 16:08:19 UTC; 3 days ago
     Docs: man:nginx(8)
 Main PID: 2369 (nginx)
    Tasks: 2 (limit: 1153)
   CGroup: /system.slice/nginx.service
           ├─2369 nginx: master process /usr/sbin/nginx -g daemon on; master_process on;
           └─2380 nginx: worker process

Configuration

Replace the default nginx configuration at /etc/nginx/sites-available/ with:

server {
  listen 80;
  listen [::]:80;
  server_name domain;
  root html_location;
  location / {
    try_files /$uri /$uri/index.html /index.html =404;
  }

  location /api {
      proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000;
		  rewrite /api/(.*) /$1  break;
                  proxy_set_header  X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
                  proxy_set_header  Host $host;
                  proxy_set_header  X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
  }
}

Followed by:

sudo apt install certbot nginx python3
certbot --nginx -d nym-validator.yourdomain.com -m you@yourdomain.com --agree-tos --noninteractive --redirect

Configure your firewall

The following commands will allow you to set up a firewall using ufw.

# check if you have ufw installed
ufw version
# if it is not installed, install with
sudo apt install ufw -y
# enable ufw
sudo ufw enable
# check the status of the firewall
sudo ufw status

Now open the ports:

sudo ufw allow 22,80,443/tcp
# check the status of the firewall
sudo ufw status