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Running Lighthouse Beacon

One or more Lighthouse Beacon services can be configured with the services.ethereum.lighthouse-beacon prefix.

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{ pkgs, ...}: {
  services.ethereum.lighthouse-beacon.sepolia = {
    enable = true;
    openFirewall = true;
    args = {
      network = "sepolia"; # (Optional) defaults to beacon name
      execution-jwt = secrets.lighthouse_jwt_secret.path;
      checkpoint-sync-url = "https://sepolia.checkpoint-sync.ethdevops.io";
      genesis-state-url = "https://sepolia.checkpoint-sync.ethdevops.io";
    };
    http-address = "0.0.0.0";
  };

  services.ethereum.lighthouse-beacon.goerli = {
    enable = true;
    ...
  };
}

Note: It is recommended to use an attribute name that matches the network that Lighthouse Beacon is configured for.

Configuration

Many of Lighthouse Beacon's process arguments have been mapped to NixOS types and can be provided via the args section of the config. For a detailed list please refer to the NixOS Options reference.

Additional arguments can be provided in a list directly to the Lighthouse Beacon process via the extraArgs attribute as shown above.

Systemd service

For each instance that is configured a corresponding Systemd service is created. The service name follows a convention of lighthouse-beacon-${name}.service.

Config Name Service name
services.ethereum.lighthouse-beacon.sepolia sepolia lighthouse-beacon-sepolia.service
services.ethereum.lighthouse-beacon.goerli goerli lighthouse-beacon-goerli.service
services.ethereum.lighthouse-beacon.mainnet mainnet lighthouse-beacon-mainnet.service

The service that is created can then be introspected and managed via the standard Systemd toolset.

Action Command
Status systemctl status lighthouse-beacon-sepolia.service
Stop systemctl stop lighthouse-beacon-sepolia.service
Start systemctl start lighthouse-beacon-sepolia.service
Restart systemctl restart lighthouse-beacon-sepolia.service
Logs journalctl -xefu lighthouse-beacon-sepolia.service

Using a Lighthouse Beacon fork

A different version of Lighthouse Beacon can be configured via the package option.

To configure a custom fork for example:

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{ pkgs, ...}: {
  services.ethereum.lighthouse-beacon.sepolia = {
    enable = true;
    package = pkgs.my-lighthouse-beacon;
    ...
  };
}

Opening ports

By default, openFirewall is set to false. If set to true firewall rules are added which will expose the following ports:

Protocol Config Default value
UDP discovery-port 9000
UDP/TCP quic-port 9001
TCP http-port 5052

Note: it is important when running multiple instances of Lighthouse Beacon on the same machine that you ensure they are configured with different ports.