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.

By default, all binaries are installed inside /usr/local/bitcoin-core-<version>/bin directory. So for example, if you are installing the version 23.0, if you want to invoke the bitcoin-cli binary, you will need to use /usr/local/bitcoin-core-23.0/bin/bitcoin-cli. Note this is the case for the rest of the binaries from Bitcoin.

Usually, you don't need the absolute binary path since this role creates a symbolic link to /home/<user>/.bitcoin. Using absolute routes is only useful when doing updates to the binary and a rollback is required or to using a specific binary version to execute an operation.

Requirements

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

List of officially supported operating systems:

How to run this?

Create a playbook like this one:

- hosts: bitcoind
  roles:
    - role: fooock.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:
    bitcoin_arch: aarch64-linux-gnu
  roles:
    - role: fooock.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:

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:

GPG verification

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

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

bitcoin_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.