7.5 KiB
description: Pantheon private network quickstart on Azure tutorial
Azure Private Network Quickstart tutorial
This tutorial describes how to use the Pantheon quickstart to run a private network of Pantheon nodes in a Docker container in a Linux Virtual machine hosted on Microsoft Azure.
Requirements
- An azure account. A free trial account will work for this tutorial.
- Be able to conne t to a remote console using SSH. If you use Linux or macOS, you already have one integrated, otherwise you can try tools like Putty (free; open-source), mRemoteNG (free; open-source), Terminals (free; open-source) or MobaXterm (free; paid Pro version available).
Connect to Azure Portal
Log in to Azure portal using your account credentials.
Creating resources
On the home page, click on 
at the top left hand corner.
Search the Marketplace for Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS by Canonical and click on it. An information page is displayed. Accept the default deployment model of Resource Manager and click Create.
In Create a virtual machine, set the following values for each tab as follows::
Basics step
- Subscription --> free trial
- Resource group --> create a new one and call it as you like, "pantheon-quickstart" may be a good name.
- Virtual machine name --> quickstart
- Region --> Central US will probably selected by default, don't bother changing it.
- Availability options --> No infrastructure redundancy required
- Image --> Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS
- Size --> You can keep the proposed hosting plan size as this quickstart won't require a lot of power and disk space. A Standard D2s v3 (2 vcpus, 8 GB memory) will do the job and will be less expensive.
- Authentication type --> choose the one you prefer, as this is not a critical machine, you can just use a password, but a SSH public key is nice too and simpler if you have one.
- Username --> provide a user name, here we propose azure as a user name and we'll use it all along this tutorial.
- Depending on the authentication method you chose, either fill the password or the public key.
- Login with Azure Acrive Directory --> keep it off
- Public inbound ports --> Allow selected ports
- Select inbound ports --> select HTTP and SSH
Then go up on the top of the page and switch to the Guest config step tab.
Guest config
This step aims at installing required software (Docker and Docker-compose) on your virtual machine and retrieve and run the quickstart private network.
To do so, click on the link named Select an extension to install and a new resource pane will appear on the right.
In the list click on Custom Script For Linux, another pane opens with a blue Create button at its bottom, click on it.
A form with only two fields appear:
First open another browser tab or window with https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PegaSysEng/pantheon-quickstart/master/azure/install_and_run.sh
Save (++ctrl+s++) this script to your computer, anywhere you like, as install_and_run.sh.
Then click on the Script files field, and once the file browsing dialog appear, select the install_and_run.sh
you just saved.
Fill the second field named Command with the following informations (replacing the pre filled sh script.sh):
sh install_and_run.sh azure
!!!important The username is included at the end of this command, azure in our case, but change to whatever you defined on the Basics step if you did not use the same as us.
Then click Ok and then on the Review + create blue button at the bottom.
Then once everything is ok (a green Validation passed message should show on the top of the screen), press the blue Create button.
You should see a Your deployment is underway screen with all the resources creating. It takes some time, around 5mn, so be patient and have a nice 🍵 or ☕.
Once the deployment is done, you should see Your deployment is complete and a list of all the deployed resources with green check-marks.
CLick on the resource named quickstart in this list and you'll land on the virtual machine overview page.
Accessing the Alethio EthStat-light explorer
On the right part of the virtual machine page you can read the Public IP address of this machine. Copy it then open a new browser tab or window and past it in the navigation bar.
You now should see the the EthStat-light explorer. Wait a few seconds and you should see 6 peers indicated and a few blocks mined.
Rpc enpoints
For the following tutorial steps, you will have to know that your RPC endpoints are the following :
- for the HTTP RPC endpoint: http://<your VM public IP>/jsonrpc
- for the Web Socket RPC endpoint: ws://<your VM public IP>/jsonws
You can now follow the quickstart tutorial starting from the part where we show how to create RPC requests.
Shutting down the quickstart
!!!attention Don't forget to shutdown the quickstart it you don't need it as it will consume your Azure resources and that can be expensive of at least drain your free credits from your free trial account.
You have multiple ways to shutdown the quickstart depending on if you want to restart it from scratch after that or continue using the same installation. Here are the options:
I want to remove everything from my Azure account.
This is the only way to be sure your Azure resources won't consume any credits.
To do so, simply navigate in the Azure portal to your resource group, the one we named pantheon-quickstart then click on the Delete resource group button.
I want to remove the virtual machine only.
Then simply navigate in the Azure portal to your resource group, the one we named pantheon-quickstart then click on the virtual machine resource and click the Delete button.
I want to keep the VM but remove the nodes network.
Navigate to the VM in your Azure portal (click on All services in the left pane, then on Virtual machines and click on the one you named quickstart) and click the connect button that will give you the information to connect with SSH (see Requirements).
Once connected to the machine, navigate to the pantheon-quickstart directory:
cd pantheon-quickstart
then run the remove script
./remove.sh
If you want to run the network again, then you can use the following script:
./run.sh -p 80
Where 80 is the port number to use for Block Explorer and RPC connections.
I just want to stop the nodes network and be able to resume it.
Connect to the VM using SSH like for "I want to keep the VM but remove the nodes network." but instead of running the remove script, run the stop script.
./stop.sh
you will be then able to resume the network with
./resume.sh