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Blink Labs

Quick Start Guide

Quick Start

Section titled “Quick Start”

TxTop is a mempool inspector for Cardano Node software.

You can use TxTop as a local monitoring tool for a Cardano Node (cardano-node) meant to provide a local view of a running node’s mempool transactions with a simple icon legend for at-a-glance transaction categorization.

Simply download the TxTop binary file from blinklabs.io on to your node server. Then run TxTop in the server command line. It’s that simple to use and gives you the ability to inspecting your Cardano Node’s mempool with at-a-glance simple icons!

To get started follow the steps below

Step 1 - Download binary from Blinklabs

Section titled “Step 1 - Download binary from Blinklabs”

Step 1-A - First start by going to https://blinklabs.io/projects-open-source and scroll down to TxTop.

txtop-blinklabs-site

Step 1-B - Select the operating system of your node server.

txtop-blinklabs-site-operating-system

Step 1-C - You can either download the binary file and move the file to your node server or…

txtop-blinklabs-site-download


Copy the path from Blinklabs and run the following command to download the binary file on your node server

txtop-blinklabs-site-copy-link

⚠️ Adjust the link path to the correct path for the version you want to download.

wget -cO - https://github.com/blinklabs-io/txtop/releases/download/v0.12.3/txtop-v0.12.3-linux-amd64 > txtop

Step 2 - Change Permissions

Section titled “Step 2 - Change Permissions”

For this example, we named the binary file txtop and saved the file to our $NODE_HOME folder. To make the file executable run the following command:

⚠️ Adjust the file path and file name if needed.

chmod +x $NODE_HOME/txtop

Step 3 - Run txtop

Section titled “Step 3 - Run txtop”

Run the executable file by running the following command.

⚠️ For this example, we named the binary file txtop and saved the file to our $NODE_HOME folder.

cd $NODE_HOME
./txtop

txtop-screen

Congratulations you are ready to start inspecting your mempool transactions with TxTop!

Section titled “Congratulations you are ready to start inspecting your mempool transactions with TxTop!”

💡 Tip: TxTop connects to the Cardano node using the socket.

Section titled “💡 Tip: TxTop connects to the Cardano node using the socket.”

A user can set these variables on their system through their environment variables to modify the behavior.

  • NETWORK, CARDANO_NETWORK - these set the network name, if both are given, NETWORK “wins” so it works out of the box in a cardano-node container, defaults to mainnet
  • CARDANO_NODE_NETWORK_MAGIC - (optional) Manually configure network magic
  • CARDANO_NODE_SOCKET_PATH - Sets path to UNIX socket of node, defaults to /opt/cardano/ipc/socket unless NETWORK is set, then uses /ipc/node.socket
  • CARDANO_NODE_SOCKET_TCP_HOST - Sets the TCP host for NtC communication (socat), defaults to empty
  • CARDANO_NODE_SOCKET_TCP_PORT - Sets the TCP port for NtC communication (socat), defaults to 30001