Anchor Installation Guide

This guide provides step-by-step instructions for installing Anchor.

Recommended System Requirements

Anchor itself is a light-weight client when run alone. However, as Anchor needs to connect to a beacon node and an execution client, this implies that a complete setup will require the hardware specifications equivalent to running an Ethereum node.

Anchor can be run independently of an Ethereum beacon node and execution client, in which case the requirements are that of a standard validator client. These are very light weight and can run on small machines such as raspberry pi's. However, Anchor does have its own network and has minimum bandwidth requirements of around 20MB/s.

1. Download the Latest Release from GitHub

1. Visit the Anchor Releases page.
2. Download the appropriate binary for your operating system.
3. Extract the file if necessary and move the binary to a location in your PATH (e.g., /usr/local/bin/).

Example

# General download link format
# Replace <version> and <platform> with the appropriate values.
wget https://github.com/sigp/anchor/releases/download/<version>/anchor-<version>-<platform>.tar.gz
tar -xvf anchor-<version>-<platform>.tar.gz
 
# Specific version example
wget https://github.com/sigp/anchor/releases/download/v1.0.0/anchor-v1.0.0-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
tar -xvf anchor-v1.0.0-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
sudo mv anchor /usr/local/bin/

Verify the installation:

anchor node --version

2. Run Anchor Using Docker

1. Pull the latest Anchor Docker image:

   docker pull sigp/anchor:latest

2. Verify the installation:

   docker run --rm -it sigp/anchor:latest node --version

3. Clone and Build Locally

1. Clone the Anchor repository and build the binary:

   git clone https://github.com/sigp/anchor.git
   cd anchor
   make

   The binary should be installed at ~/.cargo/bin.

2. If ~/.cargo/bin is not in your PATH add it:

   export PATH=$HOME/.cargo/bin:$PATH

3. Verify the installation:

   anchor --version