Waku is a family of robust, censorship-resistant communication protocols designed to enable privacy-focused messaging for web3 apps.
In other words, Waku allows you to build decentralized applications which require any form of message transfer (e.g. chats, push notifications, event broadcasting, weak consensus/coordination, message queues). You can build your own application protocols on top of plug&play Waku protocols, which ensure your node will be well connected with the network and your messages will be broadcasted reliably.
Waku also includes protocols friendly to resource restricted / adaptive devices like smartphones or laptops which may not have a lot of compute power or bandwith.
The deployment manifests in this folder target users who wish to support the Waku Network as a node operator (i.e. making the network more robust, decentralized and private), but also users who would like to build an application on top of waku.
The deployment.minimal.yaml is the easiest way to support the Waku Network as it only enables relay protocol (which is the backbone of the network) and discovery protocols (so that your know can discover other peers)
The deployment.full.pg.yaml is more comprehensive deployment which enables additional protocols (filter, lightpush, store) targetting resource restricted devices (i.e. those not able or willing to run the relay protocol) or devices with potential to not be always online.
Waku nodes need to be able to advertise public IP address (included in the multiaddress). Due to a way how Akash handles IP leases, we need to do a "two step deployment":
- Deploy "broken" app
- Fix it by updating the deployment with real public IP
- Deploy deployment.minimal.yaml
- Get the leased IP and uncomment and update the argument in
services.node.args:--nat=extip:{MY_IP}
This deployment not only deploys Waku node, but also a Postgres database serving as an archive for the store protocol
- Deploy deployment.full.pg.yaml
- You may want to change the
POSTGRES_PASSWORDinservices.node.envandservices.postgres.env(make sure both values match!)
- You may want to change the
- Get the leased IP
- Configure your DNS with the leased IP (i.e. create the A record for the domain you want to use for your waku noed)
- Update the environment variables in
services.node.env:- DOMAIN= #Your domain goes here - IP_ADDR= #Leased IP goes here - NODEKEY= #Optional: ECDSA PrivateKey used by your node - your PeerID is calculated based on this, so if you want to preserve your PeerID across restarts, use this option
After applying the updated deployment, you should see Let's Encrypt certificates being provisioned in logs and then node starting and relaying messages.
Two important pieces of information about your node are the node's multiaddresses and ENR. You can find both early in the logs output after the deployment.
[node]: INF 2023-08-14 13:59:38.175+00:00 PeerInfo topics="waku node" tid=1 file=waku_node.nim:796 peerId=16U*9q9fq5 addrs=@[]
[node]: INF 2023-08-14 13:59:38.175+00:00 Listening on topics="waku node" tid=1 file=waku_node.nim:803 full=[/dns4/waku.myrandomdemos.online/tcp/60000/p2p/16Uiu2HAmDdZ1brt7nq717ugWSK1EcGdaxUMVmHeVFzcPGb9q9fq5][/dns4/waku.myrandomdemos.online/tcp/8000/wss/p2p/16Uiu2HAmDdZ1brt7nq717ugWSK1EcGdaxUMVmHeVFzcPGb9q9fq5]
[node]: INF 2023-08-14 13:59:38.175+00:00 DNS: discoverable ENR topics="waku node" tid=1 file=waku_node.nim:804 enr=enr:-OG4QIzHr0Xd9OJVY3cDxqmDvwprccDQcRL0km9LR-q0MnjwFXZsqri_mnFwECqzVOxi78YierreeH9DUyYpdCeWZvIBgmlkgnY0gmlwhLhporWKbXVsdGlhZGRyc7hCAB42GXdha3UubXlyYW5kb21kZW1vcy5vbmxpbmUG6mAAIDYZd2FrdS5teXJhbmRvbWRlbW9zLm9ubGluZQYfQN4DiXNlY3AyNTZrMaEDDn10Z_V6Qh_BJV0BA_Y7wuTaApavCGi0WiIoZkMlGXyDdGNwgupgg3VkcIIjLYV3YWt1Mg8
You can verify that your deployment was successful and your node is reachable by connecting to it using wakucanary tool or, if you used the full deployment, by connecting via WSS using one of the js-waku-examples.
You can monitor your deployment with Prometheus and use a Grafana dashboard available in https://github.com/waku-org/nwaku-compose/tree/master/monitoring
You should see basic metrics printed in logs as well:
[node]: INF 2023-08-15 10:39:37.807+00:00 Relay peer connections topics="waku node peer_manager" tid=1 file=peer_manager.nim:683 inRelayConns=4/160 outRelayConns=17/80 totalConnections=24/300 notConnectedPeers=137 outsideBackoffPeers=5
[node]: INF 2023-08-15 10:39:39.460+00:00 Finished dialing multiple peers topics="waku node peer_manager" tid=1 file=peer_manager.nim:532 successfulConns=0 attempted=3
[node]: INF 2023-08-15 10:39:40.532+00:00 Total connections initiated topics="waku node metrics" tid=1 file=waku_metrics.nim:56 count=0.0
[node]: INF 2023-08-15 10:39:40.532+00:00 Total messages topics="waku node metrics" tid=1 file=waku_metrics.nim:57 count=231479.0
[node]: INF 2023-08-15 10:39:40.532+00:00 Total store peers topics="waku node metrics" tid=1 file=waku_metrics.nim:58 count=0.0
[node]: INF 2023-08-15 10:39:40.532+00:00 Total peer exchange peers topics="waku node metrics" tid=1 file=waku_metrics.nim:59 count=0.0
[node]: INF 2023-08-15 10:39:40.532+00:00 Total lightpush peers topics="waku node metrics" tid=1 file=waku_metrics.nim:60 count=0.0
[node]: INF 2023-08-15 10:39:40.532+00:00 Total filter peers topics="waku node metrics" tid=1 file=waku_metrics.nim:61 count=0.0
[node]: INF 2023-08-15 10:39:40.532+00:00 Total active filter subscriptions topics="waku node metrics" tid=1 file=waku_metrics.nim:62 count=0.0
[node]: INF 2023-08-15 10:39:40.532+00:00 Total errors topics="waku node metrics" tid=1 file=waku_metrics.nim:63 count=1.0
[node]: INF 2023-08-15 10:40:10.532+00:00 Total connections initiated topics="waku node metrics" tid=1 file=waku_metrics.nim:56 count=0.0
Notice the inRelayConns and outRelayConns - those represent the number of nodes in peer-to-peer relay network you are connected to.
Notice the Total messages metric - this represents how many messages went through your node.