tendermint/docs/deploy-testnets.md

# Deploy a Testnet

Now that we've seen how ABCI works, and even played with a few
applications on a single validator node, it's time to deploy a test
network to four validator nodes.

## Manual Deployments

It's relatively easy to setup a Tendermint cluster manually. The only
requirements for a particular Tendermint node are a private key for the
validator, stored as `priv_validator.json`, a node key, stored as
`node_key.json` and a list of the public keys of all validators, stored
as `genesis.json`. These files should be stored in
`~/.tendermint/config`, or wherever the `$TMHOME` variable might be set
to.

Here are the steps to setting up a testnet manually:

1.  Provision nodes on your cloud provider of choice
2.  Install Tendermint and the application of interest on all nodes
3.  Generate a private key and a node key for each validator using
    `tendermint init`
4.  Compile a list of public keys for each validator into a
    `genesis.json` file and replace the existing file with it.
5.  Run
    `tendermint node --proxy_app=kvstore --p2p.persistent_peers=< peer addresses >` on each node, where `< peer addresses >` is a comma separated
    list of the ID@IP:PORT combination for each node. The default port for
    Tendermint is `26656`. The ID of a node can be obtained by running
    `tendermint show_node_id` command. Thus, if the IP addresses of your nodes
    were `192.168.0.1, 192.168.0.2, 192.168.0.3, 192.168.0.4`, the command
    would look like:

```
tendermint node --proxy_app=kvstore --p2p.persistent_peers=96663a3dd0d7b9d17d4c8211b191af259621c693@192.168.0.1:26656, 429fcf25974313b95673f58d77eacdd434402665@192.168.0.2:26656, 0491d373a8e0fcf1023aaf18c51d6a1d0d4f31bd@192.168.0.3:26656, f9baeaa15fedf5e1ef7448dd60f46c01f1a9e9c4@192.168.0.4:26656
```

After a few seconds, all the nodes should connect to each other and
start making blocks! For more information, see the Tendermint Networks
section of [the guide to using Tendermint](./using-tendermint.md).

But wait! Steps 3, 4 and 5 are quite manual. Instead, use the `tendermint testnet` command. By default, running `tendermint testnet` will create all the
required files, but it won't populate the list of persistent peers. It will do
it however if you provide the `--populate-persistent-peers` flag and optional
`--starting-ip-address` flag. Run `tendermint testnet --help` for more details
on the available flags.

```
tendermint testnet --populate-persistent-peers --starting-ip-address 192.168.0.1
```

This command will generate four folders, prefixed with "node" and put them into
the "./mytestnet" directory by default.

As you might imagine, this command is useful for manual or automated
deployments.

## Automated Deployments

The easiest and fastest way to get a testnet up in less than 5 minutes.

### Local

With `docker` and `docker-compose` installed, run the command:

```
make localnet-start
```

from the root of the tendermint repository. This will spin up a 4-node
local testnet. Review the target in the Makefile to debug any problems.

### Cloud

See the [next section](./terraform-and-ansible.html) for details.