Skip to content

Running Prysm Beacon

One or more Prysm Beacon services can be configured with the services.ethereum.prysm-beacon prefix.

server.nix
 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
{ pkgs, ...}: {
  services.ethereum.prysm-beacon.sepolia = {
    enable = true;
    openFirewall = true;
    args = {
      network = "sepolia";
      jwt-secret = secrets.prysm_jwt_secret.path;
      checkpoint-sync-url = "https://sepolia.checkpoint-sync.ethdevops.io";
      genesis-beacon-api-url = "https://sepolia.checkpoint-sync.ethdevops.io";
    };
    extraArgs = [
      "--rpc-host=0.0.0.0"
      "--monitoring-host=0.0.0.0"
    ];
  };

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

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

Configuration

Many of Prysm 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 Prysm 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 prysm-beacon-${name}.service.

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

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

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

Using a Prysm Beacon fork

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

To configure a custom fork for example:

server.nix
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
{ pkgs, ...}: {
  services.ethereum.prysm-beacon.sepolia = {
    enable = true;
    package = pkgs.my-prysm-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 p2p-udp-port 12000
TCP p2p-tcp-port 13000
TCP grpc-gateway-port 3500
TCP monitoring-port 8080
TCP pprofport 8080

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