awl-bootstrap-node

This project implements a bootstrap node — a well-known, stable peer that helps new nodes join the P2P network by providing initial connection information. It supports DHT, traffic relaying, and NAT traversal. Here's a bit more information about it.

The Anywherelan project maintains a list of initial bootstrap nodes, which can be found here. However, you can help the community by setting up your own!

Getting started

To build this project, you will need a Go compiler with a version of 1.26 or higher.

CGO_ENABLED=0 go build

First, you need to generate example config.

./awl-bootstrap-node -generate-config
# you can also provide a config name using arg -config-name=config-2.yaml

It will print something like this:

Generated example config file: config.yaml
Below are addresses that can be used to connect to this bootstrap node
Replace 127.0.0.1 or ::1 with appropriate IP addresses. If you don't have IPv6 support, just skip it

/ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/6150/p2p/12D3KooWKubLLHV1WFkfzAcj9h2AuGNGsRkoztQZQVPsL1Khi2Hg
/ip4/127.0.0.1/udp/6150/quic-v1/p2p/12D3KooWKubLLHV1WFkfzAcj9h2AuGNGsRkoztQZQVPsL1Khi2Hg
/ip6/::1/tcp/7250/p2p/12D3KooWKubLLHV1WFkfzAcj9h2AuGNGsRkoztQZQVPsL1Khi2Hg
/ip6/::1/udp/7250/quic-v1/p2p/12D3KooWKubLLHV1WFkfzAcj9h2AuGNGsRkoztQZQVPsL1Khi2Hg

This configuration file config.yaml is ready to use. It will listen on the 0.0.0.0 address and has default community bootstrap peers.

It needs a config.yaml file near the binary to run.

./awl-bootstrap-node

To use this server with your awl client, you need to modify bootstrapPeers field in the config_awl.json file, which is located here.

Example:

{
  "p2pNode": {
    "peerId": "REDACTED",
    "name": "REDACTED",
    "identity": "REDACTED",
    "bootstrapPeers": [
      "/ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/6150/p2p/12D3KooWKubLLHV1WFkfzAcj9h2AuGNGsRkoztQZQVPsL1Khi2Hg"
    ]
  },
.... other fields are omitted
}

Metrics

The node exposes Prometheus metrics at /metrics on its HTTP API address (httpListenAddress, default 127.0.0.1:9010):

curl http://127.0.0.1:9010/metrics

This includes libp2p's built-in metrics (libp2p_relaysvc_*, libp2p_autonatv2_*, libp2p_swarm_*, libp2p_rcmgr_*, libp2p_identify_*, libp2p_holepunch_*, ...), Go runtime/process metrics (go_*, process_*), and a few bootstrap-node-specific gauges (awl_bootstrap_*): node info/uptime, DHT routing table size, node bandwidth and peerstore size. The official libp2p Grafana dashboards can be used as-is.

Grafana + Prometheus stack

The awl repository ships a ready-to-use Prometheus + Grafana monitoring stack under monitoring/ (docker-compose with the official libp2p dashboards). Since the bootstrap node exposes the same libp2p_* metrics, that stack works here without changes — the most relevant dashboards for a bootstrap node are relaysvc, autonatv2, swarm and resource-manager.

To point it at this node, set the scrape target in monitoring/prometheus.yml to this node's HTTP address (default port 9010 instead of awl's 8639):

  - job_name: awl-bootstrap
    metrics_path: /metrics
    static_configs:
      - targets:
          - host.docker.internal:9010

Profiling

pprof endpoints are served under /api/v0/debug/pprof/ and are enabled by default. Set disablePprof: true in the config to turn them off.