Stacks 101

Stacks Node Tutorials

There are three main steps to run a Stacks Node outlined below, each containing a link to a tutorial including more detail.

Note: this documentation is an alternate version of and may vary slightly from the official Stacks documentation.

Bitcoin Node

A walkthrough for setting up and interacting with bitcoind for use with stacks-node.

Stacks Keychain

A walkthrough of setting up a stacks keychain using various tools.

Stacks Node

A walkthrough for setting up stacks-node and configuring it for mining.

A local bitcoin node is required for stacks-node to interact with the bitcoin blockchain.

Please be aware of the system requirements for running one , notably ~40 GB of space for the testnet version and ~350 GB of space for mainnet.

Bitcoin Core download links: bitcoin.org and bitcoincore.org (remember to verify the download once complete)
Default bitcoind configuration for mainnet
Default bitcoind configuration for testnet

A stacks keychain provides the necessary private key to generate associated BTC and STX addresses for use by the miner.

The same keychain can be used in the Stacks Explorer, a STX wallet, or to sign transactions.

Note: remember to back up your 24 word seed! Nobody can recover it for you.

@stacks/cli - tool provided by Hiro (formerly Blockstack) to generate a keychain
stacks-gen - tool provided by Pascal (psq) to generate a keychain

The stacks-node software downloads the Stacks blockchain, verifies transactions, and can participate in mining.

Note: a node can operate in two modes, as a follower or as a miner.

A follower node will download the Stacks blockchain, verify transactions, contribute to the decentralization of the network, and provide an API to interact with the blockchain data.
A miner node does everything a follower node does, as well as submitting leader elections to create the next block in the Stacks chain.