Hosting a Chainlink node on Google Cloud

Context

This repository helps you install a high-available pool of chainlink nodes on Google Cloud Platform, running on Kubernetes. The setup follows the best practices put forward by the Chainlink documentation.

Prerequisits

In order to have a smooth installation, it is assumed you have created a project on Google Cloud Platform and have installed and authenticated the Google Cloud SDK on your local machine.

Make sure you can run the following command to validate gcloud is installed correctly and you are authenticated with the correct Google account:

gcloud auth list

You will also need to install Terraform. This setup has been tested with version 0.14.9. Run the following to confirm your version:

terraform version

Changelog

If you installed the deployment with container version 0.7.5, you need to upgrade to chainlink version 0.9.10 first before upgrading to version 0.10.3 in order to run migrations.

Installation

While all steps have been tested on Mac OS X 11.2.3 Big Sur, they should be portable to any other OS capable of running Terraform and the Google Cloud SDK.

1. Getting the code

We'll need the files in this repo, so go ahead and clone it to your local machine. If you're unfamiliar with git, download a ZIP of this repo and extract it.

git clone https://github.com/Pega88/chainlink-gcp
cd chainlink-gcp

2. Preparing your environment

Follow Google's documentation and create a new project and enable billing on the project. Remember the project id you chose.

Creating a project

3. Running the initialization

Run the setup.sh script passing 2 paramters:

the project id of the project you created (not the project name). If you are unsure, you can run gcloud projects list to get the list of your projects ids.
the email address you wish to use for your Chainlink Node login. A password will be generated and shown as output of the script.

for example

sh setup.sh chainlink-dryrun-3 admin@gmail.com

This script will prepare the environment for you with the following steps. Please have 10 minutes patience for it to complete. While this script is an easy onboarding into running a Chainlink node on Kubernetes in Google Cloud, it is recommended to digest the script and adapt the Terraform code to own needs, as well as configuring a remote backend (e.g. Google Cloud Storage bucket). Therefore, this repository should be used as a quickstart and not as a production-ready deployment.

Steps:

Create Google Service Account & Generate Key
Grant Service Account access to create required resources
Run terraform

The terraform code will:

Create a Google Kubernetes Engine Cluster on Google Cloud
Create a chainlink namespace
Deploy a postgres database in the cluster
Deploy a Chainlink Node in the cluster
Expose the Node using a HTTP L7 Google Cloud Global Load Balancer

To read more about the advantages of this GCLB, please visit the docs.

If you are live following the deployment from the Google Cloud Console, be aware it's expected to have pending pods or restart loops, as the chainlink node requires the postgres database to be fully initialized first. Terraform will only return when everything is fully functional, so please be patient.

4. Connecting to your Chainlink Node

The output of the script will provide you with an IP address, a chainlink node password (api-credentials) and a wallet password for your ethereum wallet of the node.

Visit the IP address to login using the email address you provided before and the password shown in the output. Please note that it can take up to 20 minutes for Google to fully provision the Load Balancer. In the meantime you can get 502 and 404 errors.

Expected output should look as follows:

script output

5. (Optional) Protecting your node using Cloud IAP

Using Cloud IAP, you can protect your node running on GKE from unauthorized access even before authenticating to the node itself, without the need of a VPN connection. Using IAP, Google will ensure correct Authentication and Authorization before allowing access to the actual node. More details about the concept can be found here.

Setting up IAP requires some manual steps and is fully documented here. Be aware IAP works with HTTPS which will require you to link a domain name to the Google Cloud Load Balancer IP.

7. Donations

If you like this project and want to support further development:

BTC: 36PX1UfcCt3BYiVvvd6vyJM9totHPLqBzo
ETH/LINK: 0x3340F150115C2081C33eee57560E5712a19105dE

Pega88 / chainlink-gcp

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