Running your own Bitcoin full node with Docker

Running your own bitcoind full node with docker/docker-compose

While developing different bitcoin tools, the requirement of spinning up a new full node for testing comes up quite often.

In order to speed up this process, I’ve come to build and run bitcoin-core inside a docker container quite often.

I’ve created a bootstrapping repo bitcoind-docker based on the work of @ruimarinho adding some small fixes, docker-compose and rpcauth script for generating rpc user and the example bitcoin.conf file from bitcoin-core.

1. Clone:

• git clone https://github.com/Auronmatrix/bitcoind-docker
• cd bitcoind-docker

2. Configure

Configure the bitcoin.conf file to be relevant to your requirements. Commonly used commands include -server=1, -printtoconsole=1 and -regtest=1. These commands can also be added to the compose file under the command property.

See the bitcoin.conf for details on available commands.

3. Enable RPC

If you wish to enable the bitcoind rpc server, you should generate the login credentials for the RPC-USER.

• cd rpcauth
• python3 rpcauth.py yourusername yoursupersecretpassword

Copy output to bitcoin.conf or add as command to docker-compose.yml. Make sure you set -server=1 in either and check out the rpc binding options for allowing rpc access from outside the container.

4. Building and running

Once the config has been set up, run the container

• docker-compose build
• docker-compose up -d

View the logs with docker-compose logs -f

This should be enough to get you started with running your own bitcoin node. Make sure to study up the different configuration options.