Here are the rules: if you read this post all the way through, you have to deploy a smart contract on your private Ethereum blockchain yourself. I give you all the code I used here in Github so you have no excuses not to.

But if you don’t follow the rules and you only want to read, hopefully this helps give a perspective of starting with nothing and ending with a blockchain app.

By the end, you’ll have started a local private Ethereum blockchain, connected two different nodes as peers, written and compiled a smart contract, and have a web interface that allows users to ask questions, deploy the questions on the blockchain, and then lets the users answer.

If you’re confused, run into an error, or want to say something else, go ahead an write a comment, get in contact, or say something on Twitter.

Oh, and here’s the Github repo, so go ahead and fork  it (if you don’t want to copy paste all the code here) and then if you make updates you want to share, I’ll throw this in the README.

Private Blockchain Creation

To create a single node, we need the following genesis.json, which represents the initial block on the private blockchain.

//genesis.json
{
 "alloc": {},
 "config": {
   "chainID": 72,
   "homesteadBlock": 0,
   "eip155Block": 0,
   "eip158Block": 0
 },
 "nonce": "0x0000000000000000",
 "difficulty": "0x4000",
 "mixhash": "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000",
 "coinbase": "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000",
 "timestamp": "0x00",
 "parentHash": "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000",
 "extraData": "0x11bbe8db4e347b4e8c937c1c8370e4b5ed33adb3db69cbdb7a38e1e50b1b82fa",
 "gasLimit": "0xffffffff"
}

If you want a somewhat full explanation of the fields, look at this Stack Overflow answer. The big ones in our case here are difficulty being low, because we don’t want to have to wait long for blocks to be mined on our test network, and then gasLimit being high to allow the amount of work that can be done by a node in the block to be able to process every transaction.

Go ahead and open a terminal, make sure geth is installed in whatever way works for your OS, and then cd into the folder that you have your genesis.json file saved. Running run the following command will initialize the blockchain for this node.

$ geth --datadir "/Users/USERNAME/Library/PrivEth" init genesis.json

–datadir specifies where we want the all the data for the blockchain to be located. On a mac, the default is ~/Library/Ethereum. Since we have multiple nodes running, we can’t have them sharing the same data folder, so we’re going to specify. Linux and Windows machines have different default datadirs, so take a look at those to see in general where they should be located.

After running this init command with the genesis.json file we want to use, go checkout that --datadir directory. You’ll see a bunch of files, so feel free to poke around. Not necessary right now, but you’ll want to look around there eventually.

For this to be a blockchain, we need more than one node. For blockchains to become peers, we need them to have the same genesis file. So we’re going to run the same command as above, from the same directory, but this time with a different datadir.

geth --datadir "/Users/USERNAME/Library/PrivEth2" init genesis.json

With all the code here, we’re going to be working in the same directory. The code is the same, but with the command line options, we’ll be able to separate these processes by the command line arguments.

Initializing the chain for both nodes.

When running geth with a different --datadir, you’ll be running separate nodes no matter where you ran the command from. Just remember to specify the --datadir each time so it doesn’t fall back to default. Also note that I changed the names for these datadirs, so watch out if you see different names in the screenshots.

Opening the Consoles

So far, we’ve done three things. 1) Created a genesis.json file in a working directory of your choosing, 2) picked a directory to store the blockchain for one node and initialized the first block, and 3) picked a different directory to store the blockchain for the other node. Very little code and a few commands.

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