Single-machine Deployment

Before You Begin

If you are not familiar with Firehose, read the Overview page, which should give you enough information about the main pieces involved in spinning up a Firehose environment.

Choose a reliable RPC source

In a Solana setup, the Firehose reader will fetch its block data using RPC calls. While plenty of providers offer an Solana RPC endpoint, you can also run your own RPC node for this purpose, which is out of the scope of this document (see https://docs.solanalabs.com/operations)

Note that a firehose "poller" can connect to multiple RPC sources for redundancy, and a H-A setup can contain multiple pollers that deduplicate the received blocks.

Choose your "first streamable block"

Firehose will try, by default, to fetch the blocks from genesis (block 0 on Solana) and produce the blocks from there. Depending on your use case (and RPC data availability), you may want to choose an absolute lower block from which you want to start indexing (ignoring all blocks below).

Choose your storage destination

Firehose sends blocks data in a stream AND stores it on disk. A single-machine deployment will work with local storage, but H-A setup will work best with an "object storage" service like GCS/S3 or equivalent.

Firehose creates temporary "one-block-files", then "merged-block-files". (Substreams service will also create a large amount of cache files).

The compressed merged blocks alone will consume 61GiB compressed PER DAY (22TiB per year)

Download and install the Firehose-core binary

  1. Download the latest firecore binary. Make sure you download the right binary for your computer (ARM or x86). Firehose-core is a Go project, so you can always build the binary from source.

  2. Add the firecore binary to the $PATH of your system. Verify that the command works:

$ firecore --version
firecore version v1.6.6 (Commit 26b7acc, Built 2024-11-20T18:39:14Z)

Download and install the Firehose-solana binary

  1. Download the latest firesol binary. Make sure you download the right binary for your computer (ARM or x86). Firehose-solana is a Go project, so you can always build the binary from source.

  2. Add the firesol binary to the $PATH of your system. Verify that the command works:

$ firesol help
firesol fetching and tooling

Usage:
  firesol [command]
(...)

Start the Firehose Processes

We recommend running firehose in at least two different processes:

  • Process 1 will run the following components: reader-node, merger and relayer.

  • Process 2 will run the following components: firehose, substreams-tier1 and substreams-tier2.

These two processes will share the same folder to persist the data, which is called firehose-data by default. It is important that both processes have concurrent access to the data folder.

  1. Create a new folder, which you will be used to host all the Firehose data generated by the extraction. Make sure the folder has enough permissions to persist data in the filesystem.

$ mkdir /srv/firehose-data

  1. Create the configuration file for Process 1, called reader-merger-relayer.yaml:

start:
  args: # 1.
  - reader-node
  - merger
  - relayer
  flags:
    common-first-streamable-block: 300000000 # 2.
    reader-node-path: firesol # 3.
    reader-node-arguments:
      fetch rpc 300000000 # 4
      --state-dir "{node-data-dir}/poller/states"
      --block-fetch-batch-size=4 # 5.
      --endpoints=http://my.rpc.endpoint:8999  # 6.
      --endpoints=<RPC endpoint 2>
      --endpoints=<RPC endpoint 3>

  1. Specifies the components to spin up.

  2. Specifies the first block to stream.

  3. Specifies the solana-specific binary location (optionally with full path).

  4. Specifies the arguments of the firesol binary. In this case, the RPC Poller mode is used with 300000000 as starting block number.

  5. Specifies how many blocks must be fetched from the RPC at a time. For example, if it is set to 20, a batch of 20 blocks will be requested to the RPC.

  6. Specifies the RPC endpoint. You can specify several endpoints.

  7. Create the configuration file for Process 2, called firehose-substreams.yaml:

start:
  args: # 1.
  - firehose
  - substreams-tier1
  - substreams-tier2
  flags:
    common-first-streamable-block: 300000000 # 2.
    common-live-blocks-addr: localhost:10014 # 3.
    substreams-tier1-block-type: sf.cosmos.type.v2.Block # 4.
    substreams-tier1-grpc-listen-addr: :9000 # 5.

  1. Specifies the components to spin up.

  2. Specifies the first block to stream.

  3. Specifies the address where to reach the relayer component running in its own isolated Firehose process.

  4. substreams-tier1 component flag: specifies the data model of the extracted data.

  5. substreams-tier1 component flag: specifies where the Substreams server listens for connections.

  6. Lastly, start two Firecore processes in two different command-line terminals.

firecore start -c reader-merger-relayer.yaml
firecore start -c firehose-substreams.yaml
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