mempool/README.md

Bitcoin Mempool Statistics

This is the code to create the mempool statistics for bitcoin that are online at https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/

Installation: Part 1 - Logging

You need to be running a bitcoin full node. It can be a pruned node or an archival node. I assume you have already set it up. You also need to support RPC to this node. Add rpcuser/rpcpassword to bitcoin.conf to enable this.

I recommend to create a new user mempool. Checkout this repository into his home directory:

sudo -H -u mempool bash
cd $HOME
git clone https://github.com/jhoenicke/mempool

Edit mempool.sh to adapt paths as necessary, especially the path to bitcoin-cli. Add a bitcoin.conf with rpcuser/rpcpassword settings to /home/mempool/.bitcoin, to be able to use bitcoin-cli. You can test your setup by running

bitcoin-cli getmempoolinfo

Install mysql and create a database. Then you can test your configuration by running mempool.sh. If you don't want to use mysql, comment out the four lines starting with open(SQL at the end of mempool-sql.pl. In that case zooming and auto-update in the webinterface won't work.

sudo apt install mysql_server
mysql_secure_installation
mysql -u root -p <<EOF
create database btc_mempool;
grant all privileges on btc_mempool.* TO 'mempool'@'localhost' identified by '<secret password>';
grant select on btc_mempool.* TO 'www'@'localhost' identified by '<redacted>';
EOF
cat > ~/.my.cnf <<EOF
[client]
user=mempool
password=<secret password>
EOF
cd mempool
perl mempool-create.pl | mysql btc_mempool
./mempool.sh

You are almost ready now. Check that everything works. There should be a file mempool.log containing one line of statistics. There should be newly created files in /dev/shm/mempool-btc that contain the dynamic data the webserver should serve. If everything looks fine add the following crontab entry (using crontab -e):

* * * * * /home/mempool/mempool/mempool.sh 

Installation: Part 2 - Web service

Install a web server of your choice. For refreshing/zooming you need php and php-mysql. Then link/copy the web subdirectory to the web root. Finally link to the dynamic js files in /dev/shm/mempool-btc.

cd $HOME/mempool/web/queue
sudo ln -s $HOME/mempool/web/* /var/www/html
ln -s /dev/shm/mempool-btc/*.js $HOME/mempool/web/queue/

You then need to open $HOME/mempool/web/queue/mempool.js in your favorite editor and change the config array to include your web server configuration.