Launching the Storage Provider

This guide assumes you have read the Building and the Local Testnet - Polka Storage guides and have a running testnet to connect to.

Setting up the Storage Provider doesn't have a lot of science, but isn't automatic either! In this guide, we'll cover how to get up and running with the Storage Provider.

Generating the PoRep Parameters

First and foremost, to allow the Storage Provider to generate PoRep proofs, we need to first generate their parameters, we do that with the following command:

$ polka-storage-provider-client proofs porep-params
Generating params for 2KiB sectors... It can take a couple of minutes ⌛
Generated parameters:
/home/user/polka-storage/2KiB.porep.params
/home/user/polka-storage/2KiB.porep.vk
/home/user/polka-storage/2KiB.porep.vk.scale

As advertised, the command has generated the following files:

• 2KiB.porep.params — The PoRep parameters
• 2KiB.porep.vk — The verifying key
• 2KiB.porep.vk.scale — The verifying key, encoded in SCALE format

Registering the Storage Provider

If you encounter errors while running extrinsics, check the parachain logs. Refer to the Checking the logs section under the Local Testnet - Polka Storage Provider chapter.

Logically, if you want to participate in the network, you need to register. To do so, you need to run one of the following commands:

storagext-cli --sr25519-key <KEY> storage-provider register "<peer_id>"
storagext-cli --ed25519-key <KEY> storage-provider register "<peer_id>"
storagext-cli --ecdsa-key <KEY> storage-provider register "<peer_id>"

Where <KEY> has been replaced accordingly to its key type. <peer_id> can be anything as it is currently used as a placeholder. For example:

storagext-cli --sr25519-key "//Charlie" storage-provider register "placeholder"

After registering, there is one more thing to be done, to be able to verify proofs in local testnet. We need to set the global verifying key in the network, so it's compatible with the proving parameters:

storagext-cli --sr25519-key "//Charlie" proofs set-porep-verifying-key @2KiB.porep.vk.scale

Additionally, you will need to add some balance to your Polka Storage escrow account, like so:

$ storagext-cli --sr25519-key "//Charlie" market add-balance 12500000000
[0x809d…8f10] Balance Added: { account: 5FLSigC9HGRKVhB9FiEo4Y3koPsNmBmLJbpXg2mp1hXcS59Y, amount: 12500000000 }

You can use other balance values! There's a minimum though — 1_000_000_000 (without the _).

And you're ready!

Launching the server 🚀

Similarly to the previous steps, here too you'll need to run a command. The following is the minimal command:

polka-storage-provider-server \
  --seal-proof 2KiB \
  --post-proof 2KiB \
  --porep-parameters <POREP-PARAMS> \
  --X-key <KEY>

Where --X-key <KEY> matches the key type you used to register yourself with the network, in the previous step. For example:

polka-storage-provider-server \
  --seal-proof 2KiB \
  --post-proof 2KiB \
  --porep-parameters "2KiB.porep.params" \
  --sr25519-key "//Charlie"

Note that currently, --seal-proof and --post-proof only support 2KiB.

<POREP-PARAMS> is the resulting *.porep.params file from the first steps, in this case, 2KiB.porep.params.

When ran like this, the server will assume a random directory for the database and the storage, however, you can change that through the --database-directory and --storage-directory, respectively, if the directory does not exist, it will be created.

You can also change the parachain node address it connects to, by default, the server will try to connect to ws://127.0.0.1:42069, but you can change this using the --node-url flag.

Finally, you can change the listening addresses for the RPC and HTTP services, they default to 127.0.0.1:8000 and 127.0.0.1:8001 respectively, and can be changed using the flags --rpc-listen-address and --upload-listen-address.

For more information on the available flags, refer to the server chapter.