Setup Cosmovisor

For mainnet, it’s recommended to use Cosmovisor to run your node.

Setting up Cosmovisor is relatively straightforward. However, it does expect certain environment variables and folder structure to be set.
Cosmovisor allows you to download binaries ahead of time for chain upgrades, meaning that you can do zero (or close to zero) downtime chain upgrades. It’s also useful if your local timezone means that a chain upgrade will fall at a bad time.
Rather than having to do stressful ops tasks late at night, it’s always better if you can automate them away, and that’s what Cosmovisor tries to do.

Install

First, go and get cosmovisor (recommended approach):

# to target a specific version:
go install github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk/cosmovisor/cmd/cosmovisor@v1.0.0

Add environment variables to your shell

Some environment variables must be set to appropriate values for each node and each network.

echo "export DAEMON_NAME=sunrised" >> ~/.profile
echo "export DAEMON_HOME=$HOME/.sunrised" >> ~/.profile
echo "export DAEMON_ALLOW_DOWNLOAD_BINARIES=true" >> ~/.profile
echo "export DAEMON_LOG_BUFFER_SIZE=512" >> ~/.profile
echo "export DAEMON_RESTART_AFTER_UPGRADE=true" >> ~/.profile
echo "export UNSAFE_SKIP_BACKUP=true" >> ~/.profile

Then source your profile to have access to these variables:

source ~/.bash_profile

Set up folder structure

mkdir -p $DAEMON_HOME/cosmovisor
mkdir -p $DAEMON_HOME/cosmovisor/genesis
mkdir -p $DAEMON_HOME/cosmovisor/genesis/bin
mkdir -p $DAEMON_HOME/cosmovisor/upgrades

Set up genesis binary

Cosmovisor needs to know which binary to use at genesis. We put this in $DAEMON_HOME/cosmovisor/genesis/bin

Check our Github to know the binary version of genesis.

wget https://github.com/sunriselayer/sunrise/releases/download/<version>/sunrised
cp sunrised $DAEMON_HOME/cosmovisor/genesis/bin

Set up service

Commands sent to Cosmovisor are sent to the underlying binary. For example, cosmovisor version is the same as typing sunrised version. Nevertheless, just as we would manage sunrised using a process manager, we would like to make sure Cosmovisor is automatically restarted if something happens, for example, an error or reboot. First, create the service file:

sudo vi /lib/systemd/system/cosmovisor.service

Change the contents of the below to match your setup

[Unit]
Description=Cosmovisor daemon
After=network-online.target
[Service]
Environment="DAEMON_NAME=sunrised"
Environment="DAEMON_HOME=$DAEMON_HOME"
Environment="DAEMON_RESTART_AFTER_UPGRADE=true"
Environment="DAEMON_ALLOW_DOWNLOAD_BINARIES=true" // Recommend
Environment="DAEMON_LOG_BUFFER_SIZE=512"
Environment="UNSAFE_SKIP_BACKUP=true"
User=$USER
ExecStart=${HOME}/go/bin/cosmovisor start
Restart=always
RestartSec=3
LimitNOFILE=infinity
LimitNPROC=infinity
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Start Cosmovisor

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart systemd-journald
sudo systemctl enable cosmovisor
sudo systemctl start cosmovisor

Check it is running using:

sudo systemctl status cosmovisor

If you need to monitor the service after launch, you can view the logs using:

sudo journalctl -u cosmovisor -f -o cat