Basic Usage
Installation with pre-built binaries
To install Forest from pre-compiled binaries, please refer to the releases page or consider using Forest Docker image (explained in detail here).
Installation from source
Dependencies
- Rust - install via rustup
- OS Base-Devel/Build-Essential
- Clang compiler
For Ubuntu, you can install the dependencies (excluding Rust) with:
sudo apt install build-essential clang
Compilation & installation
From crates.io (latest release)
cargo install forest-filecoin
From repository (latest development branch)
# Clone the Forest repository
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ChainSafe/forest.git && cd forest
make install
Both approaches will compile and install forest and forest-cli to
~/.cargo/bin. Make sure you have it in your PATH.
Verifying the installation
Ensure that Forest was correctly installed.
forest --version
# forest-filecoin 0.10.0+git.2eaeb9fee
Synchronize to the Filecoin network
Start the forest node. It will automatically connect to the bootstrap peers
and start syncing the chain after the snapshot is downloaded. If it is your
first time running the node, it will take a while to download the snapshot. Note
that you will need at least 8GB of RAM to sync the mainnet chain, and over 100
GB of free disk space.
Mainnet
forest
Calibnet
forest --chain calibnet
In another shell, you can invoke commands on the running node using
forest-cli. For example, to check the synchronization status:
forest-cli sync status