# Deploy a Testnet Now that we've seen how ABCI works, and even played with a few applications on a single validator node, it's time to deploy a test network to four validator nodes. ## Manual Deployments It's relatively easy to setup a Tendermint cluster manually. The only requirements for a particular Tendermint node are a private key for the validator, stored as `priv_validator.json`, a node key, stored as `node_key.json` and a list of the public keys of all validators, stored as `genesis.json`. These files should be stored in `~/.tendermint/config`, or wherever the `$TMHOME` variable might be set to. Here are the steps to setting up a testnet manually: 1. Provision nodes on your cloud provider of choice 2. Install Tendermint and the application of interest on all nodes 3. Generate a private key and a node key for each validator using `tendermint init` 4. Compile a list of public keys for each validator into a `genesis.json` file and replace the existing file with it. 5. Run `tendermint node --proxy_app=kvstore --p2p.persistent_peers=< peer addresses >` on each node, where `< peer addresses >` is a comma separated list of the ID@IP:PORT combination for each node. The default port for Tendermint is `26656`. The ID of a node can be obtained by running `tendermint show_node_id` command. Thus, if the IP addresses of your nodes were `192.168.0.1, 192.168.0.2, 192.168.0.3, 192.168.0.4`, the command would look like: ``` tendermint node --proxy_app=kvstore --p2p.persistent_peers=96663a3dd0d7b9d17d4c8211b191af259621c693@192.168.0.1:26656, 429fcf25974313b95673f58d77eacdd434402665@192.168.0.2:26656, 0491d373a8e0fcf1023aaf18c51d6a1d0d4f31bd@192.168.0.3:26656, f9baeaa15fedf5e1ef7448dd60f46c01f1a9e9c4@192.168.0.4:26656 ``` After a few seconds, all the nodes should connect to each other and start making blocks! For more information, see the Tendermint Networks section of [the guide to using Tendermint](../tendermint-core/using-tendermint.md). But wait! Steps 3, 4 and 5 are quite manual. Instead, use the `tendermint testnet` command. By default, running `tendermint testnet` will create all the required files, but it won't populate the list of persistent peers. It will do it however if you provide the `--populate-persistent-peers` flag and optional `--starting-ip-address` flag. Run `tendermint testnet --help` for more details on the available flags. ``` tendermint testnet --populate-persistent-peers --starting-ip-address 192.168.0.1 ``` This command will generate four folders, prefixed with "node" and put them into the "./mytestnet" directory by default. As you might imagine, this command is useful for manual or automated deployments. ## Automated Deployments The easiest and fastest way to get a testnet up in less than 5 minutes. ### Local With `docker` and `docker-compose` installed, run the command: ``` make localnet-start ``` from the root of the tendermint repository. This will spin up a 4-node local testnet. Review the target in the Makefile to debug any problems. ### Cloud See the [next section](./terraform-and-ansible.md) for details.