Bitcoin Core Ansible role

Ansible role to install the Bitcoin Core client as a systemd service. By default, it uses sane defaults and some hardening measures for the Systemd service.

Summary: What does it do?

• Sets up user, if not single user system
• Downloads bitcoin core and verifies signatures
• Installs all shipped binaries to /usr/local/bin (i.e. bitcoin-cli, bitcoind, ...)
• Sets up a systemd service with configuration at /etc/bitcoind/<network>/bitcoind.conf
• Links /home/<user>/.bitcoin to /etc/bitcoind/<network>

Requirements

This role requires a user with sudo permissions to work properly.

List of officially supported operating systems:

ID	Name	Status
ubuntu2004	Ubuntu 20.04	✅
ubuntu2204	Ubuntu 22.04	✅

How to run this?

Create a playbook like this one:

- hosts: bitcoind
  roles:
    - role: mvrahden.bitcoind
      become: yes

Note that you can use become at a global level instead at the role level. If you want to install the Bitcoin node into a Raspberry Pi, just change the architecture:

- hosts: bitcoind
  become: yes
  vars:
    bitcoind_arch: aarch64-linux-gnu
  roles:
    - role: mvrahden.bitcoind

Testing

You can execute tests using molecule. Install the requirements.txt file depending on if you want to execute tests through Docker or with a VM managed by Vagrant.

molecule test

If you want to run a test through a specific operating system you can update the MOLECULE_DISTRO variable using the operating system ID mentioned in the requirements table.

Variables

You can change some variables to install this role to fit your needs. The default values to install the Bitcoin node are the following ones:

Name	Value
bitcoind_user	bitcoin
bitcoind_group	bitcoin
bitcoind_version	27.0
bitcoind_arch	x86_64-linux-gnu

If you want to install Bitcoin into a Raspberry you need to change the architecture to aarch64-linux-gnu.

To configure the Bitcoin node, you can use the following variables:

Use rpcauth.yp to generate rpcauth credentials.

Name	Value	Note
bitcoind_data_dir	/data/bitcoin
bitcoind_network	main	Valid values are: regtest, signet and test
bitcoind_rpc_auth	bitcoin:2e00...	Prevent your password from being stored as cleartext
bitcoind_rpc_user	bitcoin	If possible use btc_rpc_auth instead
bitcoind_rpc_password	bitcoin	If possible use btc_rpc_auth instead
bitcoind_zmq_host	127.0.0.1
bitcoind_bind	127.0.0.1
bitcoind_rpc_bind	127.0.0.1	This is where to expose the RPC server
bitcoind_rpc_allow_ips	[127.0.0.1]	This can be an IP or a range like 10.0.0.0/24
bitcoind_use_onion	False	This enables onion support
bitcoind_onion_proxy	127.0.0.1:9050
bitcoind_onion_nodes	['tsr2f2....onion:8333']

GPG verification

By default, this installer uses gpg to verify the integrity and signature of the downloaded artifacts. This behaviour is controlled by the bitcoind_pgp_builders_pub_key field. The content of this structure and default values are the following:

Name	ID
laanwj	71A3B16735405025D447E8F274810B012346C9A6
fanquake	E777299FC265DD04793070EB944D35F9AC3DB76A

If you only want to verify with one user, you should use something like this:

bitcoind_pgp_builders_pub_key:
  - id: 71A3B16735405025D447E8F274810B012346C9A6
    name: laanwj

I use the Guix attestations to verify the release. The data can be found on the Bitcoin Github official repository. If the release can't be trusted the role will fail the installation.