The Hedera Local Node project enables developers to establish their own local network for development and testing. The local network comprises the consensus node, mirror node, JSON-RPC relay, and other Hedera products, and can be set up using the CLI tool and Docker. This setup allows you to seamlessly build and deploy smart contracts from your local environment.
By the end of this tutorial, you'll be equipped to run a Hedera local node and generate keys, allowing you to test your projects and deploy projects in your local environment.
Open a new terminal and navigate to your preferred directory where your Hedera Local Node project will live. Run the following command to clone the repo and install dependencies to your local machine:
git clone https://github.com/hashgraph/hedera-local-node.git
cd hedera-local-node
npm install
For Windows users: You will need to update the file endings of compose-network/mirror-node/init.sh by running this in WSL:
dos2unix compose-network/mirror-node/init.sh
Ensure Docker is installed and open on your machine before running this command to get the network up and running:
// starts and generates the first 30 accounts
npm run start -- -d
or
// will start local node but will not generate the first 30 accounts
docker compose up -d
Generate Keys
To generate accounts with random private keys, run the generate-accounts command. Specify the number of accounts generated by appending the number to the hedera generate-account command. For example, to generate 5 accounts, run hedera generate-accounts 5.
Please note: Since the first 10 accounts generated are with predefined private keys, if you need 5 generated with random keys, you will run hedera start 15. The same rule applies when you use the hedera generate-accounts command.
Grab any of the account private keys generated from the Alias ECDSA keys Accounts list. This will be used as the LOCAL_NODE_OPERATOR_PRIVATE_KEY environment variable value in your .env file of your project.
Stop Your Local Network
To stop your local node, you can run the hedera stop command. If you want to keep any files created manually in the working directory, please save them before executing this command.
hedera stop
Stopping the network...
Stopping the docker containers...
Cleaning the volumes and temp files...
Alternatively, run docker compose down -v; git clean -xfd; git reset --hard to stop the local node and reset it to its original state.
docker compose down -v; git clean -xfd; git reset --hard
