IOTA Hornet Node Installation

By Phylo Last updated May 30, 2021

A step by step guide for beginners…(Part1)

With the upgrade to the Chrysalis network on April 28 2021 the IOTA protocol has encountered its biggest upgrade and protocol change in its entire history and did implement a lot of amazing new features.

An essential part of the IOTA protocol is the participation of a big amount of nodes in the network to offer a stable and secure processing of messages.

For the user of any DLT, the optimum in decentralization and user participation reachable is to run your own node which nobody else can control. This is the Idea of all P2P DLT networks since Nakamoto’s vision became reality in Bitcoin, but most Cryptocurrencies at their current state require heavy computation and expensive setups to participate in the network.

As the IOTA protocol is so lightweight and all processing is extremely optimized, running an IOTA full node is neither expensive, nor really complicated.

This guide aims to help beginners and especially users that have never extensively used Linux or a command line to setup an IOTA Hornet node on a VPS server using their Windows PC. I will explain the following steps in this guide:

Install and setup of the VPS server at Hetzner Cloud
create a secure login method to your server using SSH Keys
Install a pre-build Hornet node software script on your VPS
access the node dashboard via your standard browser and connect with other Nodes in the IOTA network.
All as easy as possible explained so that you can follow and copy every needed step.
in a second blog i will explain more in detail the routines of using, updating and monitoring your node, but this first part will lead already to a full functioning and reliable IOTA Hornet node
Please recognize that this is purely educational content from a community member that i created to help you — the final responsibility of what is happening on your server is totally on you.
The second part of this guide that focusses on managing an already running node can be found here: https://phyloiota.medium.com/iota-hornet-node-installation-2-8f2639e04d1d

What do you need to prepare before the start?

a Windows PC (but most of it works the same way on Mac or Linux ofc) with up to date Windows version and security software. It is essential that you regularly implement software updates of your operation system and Antivirus software.
Get an free account on a VPS Cloud server provider like Hetzner, Netcup, AWS, DigitalOcean, etc etc… This guide will use and explain a HETZNER VPS installation, but every other VPS will basically works the same way.
The software-package Putty:

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html

choose the Windows MSI installer file which will include the SSH client Putty and the SSH Key generator PuttyGen. Install it on your Windows system. Most modern Windows 10 computers with Intel or AMD CPU will use the 64-bit x86 version: