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Installing Bitcoin Full Node with Ordinal Protocol support on Ubuntu Google Cloud (GCP) VM

This section describes how to launch and connect to Bitcoin Fullnode kit in a Google Compute environment.

Note: Bitcoin Full Node upgraded to latest Bitcoin Core V0.25 along with bitcoin-qt, bitcoin-cli and bitcoin-wallet on Ubuntu 22.04. The VM also provide you the latest Ordinal installed which is a numbering scheme for satoshis that allows tracking and transferring individual sats. For more details please visit- Ordinals Documentation



  1. Open Bitcoin FullNode listing on GCP Marketplace.

  2. Click on Get Started button. /img/gcp/gcp_bitcoin_offer-2.png

  • It will take you to the agreement page. On this page, you can change the project from the project selector on top navigator bar as shown in the below screenshot.

  • Accept the Terms and agreements by ticking the checkbox and clicking on the AGREE button. /img/common/gcp_agreement_page.png

  • It will show you the successfully agreed popup page. Click on Deploy. /img/common/gcp_agreement_accept_page.png

  • On deployment page, give a name to your deployment.

  • For zone, you must select us-central1-a . The VM can be deployed only in us-central1-a
  • Optionally change the number of cores and amount of memory. (This defaults to 2 vCPUs and 7.5 GB ram.)
  • Optionally change the boot disk type and size. (This defaults to “Standard Persistent Disk” and 20 GB size respectively). The VM also comes with 1000GB Data Disk which will be created automatically on VM deployment.

/img/gcp/bitcoin_terraform-deployed-01.png

/img/gcp/bitcoin_terraform_deployed-02.png

  • Optionally change the network name and subnetwork names. Be sure that whichever network you specify has ports 22 (for ssh) and 3389 (for RDP) exposed.

  • Make sure to enable Google API access by checking the “Allow full access to all of Google Cloud Platforms APIs on the VM” checkbox to work the VM properly as shown in below screenshot.

/img/gcp/bitcoin_terraform_deployed-03.png

  • Click Deploy when you are done. Bitcoin Full Node Suit will begin deploying.

  1. A summary page displays when the compute engine is successfully deployed. Click on the Instance link to to go to the instance page .

  2. On the instance page, click on the “SSH” button, select “Open in browser window”.

/img/gcp/gcp_bitcoin_ssh_option.png

  1. This will open SSH window in a browser.
  2. Run below command to set the password for “ubuntu” user
sudo passwd ubuntu

/img/gcp/gcp_bitcoin_password_dashed.png

  1. Now the password for ubuntu user is set, you can connect to the VM’s desktop environment from any local windows machine using RDP protocol or linux machine using Remmina.

  2. To connect using RDP via Windows Machine, first note the external IP of the VM from VM details page as highlighted below

/img/gcp/gcp_bitcoin_vm_details.png

  1. Then From you local windows machine, goto “start” menu, in the search box type and select “Remote desktop connection”

  2. In the “Remote Desktop connection” wizard, copy the external ip and click connect

/img/gcp/bitcoin_gcprdp.png

  1. This will connect you to the VM’s desktop environment. Provide “ubuntu” as the userid and the password set in step 6 to authenticate. Click OK

/img/gcp/bitcoin_rdp_login.png

  1. Now you are connected to the out of box Bitcoin Full Node environment via Windows Machine..

/img/gcp/bitcoinvm.png

  1. To connect using RDP via Linux machine, first note the external IP of the VM from VM details page,then from your local Linux machine, goto menu, in the search box type and select “Remmina”.

Note: If you don’t have Remmina installed on your Linux machine, first Install Remmina as per your linux distribution.

/img/gcp/common/remmina-search.png

  1. In the “Remmina Remote Desktop Client” wizard, select the RDP option from dropdown and paste the external ip and click enter.

/img/gcp/common/remmina-external-ip.png

  1. This will connect you to the VM’s desktop environment. Provide “ubuntu” as the userid and the password set in step 6 to authenticate. Click OK

/img/gcp/common/remmina-rdp-login.png

  1. Now you are connected to the out of box Bitcoin Fullnode environment via Linux machine.

/img/gcp/bitcoinvm.png

  1. Bitcoin directories:

All Bitcoin ledger data is stored under /home/bitcoin directory

/img/gcp/gcp_bitcoin_folder_location.png

Bitcoin wallet and configuration file (bitcoin.conf) are located under /home/ubuntu/.bitcoin directory

/img/gcp/gcp_bitcoin_conf_location.png

  1. Once VM is provisioned, you can start Bitcoin node either via command line or using the Bitcoin QT GUI wallet
  • a. Start Bitcoin sync process using command line :
    Go to terminal and execute below command as ubuntu user to run Bitcoin daemon in background -
bitcoind

/img/gcp/bitcoin-bitcoind-command.png

To verify the command execution or to monitor the daemon, you can tail the bitcoin debug log

tail -f /home/bitcoin/debug.log

/img/gcp/bitcoin-tail-command.png

  • b. Start Bitcoin sync process using GUI:
    You can also run the sync process by running the Bitcoin-QT GUI wallet. For this, connect to the VM using RDP as described in steps 8 to 12 .Once connected, click on bitcoin-qt to start the sync process. A window may popup asking to mark the application executable . Click on “Mark Executable” button to avoid seeing this window in future.

/img/gcp/bitcoin-mark-executable.png

/img/gcp/bitcoin-GUI.png

  1. How to stop bitcoind daemon :

To manually stop bitcoind, run below command.

"bitcoin-cli stop"

/img/gcp/bitcoin-cli-stop-command.png

  1. Delete the wallet.dat file by running below command
sudo rm /home/ubuntu/.bitcoin/wallets/wallet.dat

/img/gcp/bitcoin-wallet-dat-remove-02.png

  • To know how to use the Bitcoin Full Node kit, please refer to the video tutorial series available on Bitcoin overview page.

To upgrade the ordinal to the latest stable version please refer to our Ordinal Upgrade Guide

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