Ethereum Private RPC

Set up private RPC endpoints (similar to Infura's) by running your own ethereum node. Supports both HTTPS and WSS endpoints.

Basic Usage

First download necessary files from this repository to your host:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bap2pecs/ethereum-private-rpc/main/docker-compose.yml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bap2pecs/ethereum-private-rpc/main/nginx.tmpl && wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bap2pecs/ethereum-private-rpc/main/.geth.env.example -O .geth.env

Then modify .geth.env values for:

• VIRTUAL_HOST and LETSENCRYPT_HOST: the host name for accesing the RPC endpoints. It should be a domain you own and you also need to set the DNS record to point the domain to the IP address of the server you wanted to run the containers.
• VIRTUAL_PATH: this is for hiding your endpoints from the public. You should use a long randomized string.
• VIRTUAL_DEST: should not be changed. "/" is to prevent passing sub-path to the geth RPC endpoints (or you will get 404 error).
• VIRTUAL_PORT and VIRTUAL_WS_PORT: no need to change this unless you modified the compose file to customize the ports for http and ws RPC endpoints from geth.

Finally run docker-compose up -d to start the containers. Then you can access the https and wss endpoints at:

• https://subdomain.yourdomain.tld/{VIRTUAL_PATH}
• wss://subdomain.yourdomain.tld/{VIRTUAL_PATH}

You might need to wait some time for the geth node to 1) download the data; 2) find some peers of the network. You can check those info via docker-compose logs -f.

Advanced Usage

The compose file by default runs geth node in "light" mode and has some other default configs (e.g. rpc.evmtimeout set to 60s to avoid eth_call timeout. default is 5s). You are free to customized the way you want to run the node. For exampel, if you want to run a full node, you can modify the command section under geth. For more options of geth, please refer to the official documentaion.

You can even run a different software (e.g. nethermind) for the ethereum node as long as you config it correctly to expose the ports for the RPC endpoints.

Notes

Initially, I wanted to use nginx-proxy but it does not support multi-port in a single container (see related discusion). Since geth can expose both http and ws ports, I have to use nginx and docker-gen separately per the instruction at here and here and do some customization for the nginx.tmpl template.

The major modification I did in the template was to support VIRTUAL_WS_PORT for the same VIRTUAL_HOST. In the generated nginx config file, the server for the VIRTUAL_HOST will proxy both https and wss requests. It's achieved by using a map variable in the location of proxy_pass to dynamically route requests to different upstreams based on the Upgrade request header (see more details). The modified template will correctly put the http RPC address:port URLs into one upstream directive and the ws RPC address:port URLs into another upstream directive.

Another change at the beginning of the template file is the workaround for this issue.

Contribution

Thank you for considering contributing to the repo! Anyone is welcomed to submit pull request, even for the smallest fixes or typos.

If you'd like to contribute, please create a new branch and submit a pull request for review.

License

MIT