lighthouse/book/src/ui_configuration.md

📦 Installation

Siren supports any operating system that supports containers and/or NodeJS 18, this includes Linux, MacOS, and Windows. The recommended way of running Siren is by launching the docker container.

Version Requirement

To ensure proper functionality, the Siren app requires Lighthouse v4.3.0 or higher. You can find these versions on the releases page of the Lighthouse repository.

Configuration

Siren requires a connection to both a Lighthouse Validator Client and a Lighthouse Beacon Node.

Both the Beacon node and the Validator client need to have their HTTP APIs enabled.
These ports should be accessible from Siren. This means adding the flag --http on both beacon node and validator client.

To enable the HTTP API for the beacon node, utilize the --gui CLI flag. This action ensures that the HTTP API can be accessed by other software on the same machine.

The Beacon Node must be run with the --gui flag set.

Running the Docker container (Recommended)

We recommend running Siren's container next to your beacon node (on the same server), as it's essentially a webapp that you can access with any browser.

1. Create a directory to run Siren:

   cd ~
   mkdir Siren
   cd Siren
   

2. Create a configuration file in the Siren directory: nano .env and insert the following fields to the .env file. The field values are given here as an example, modify the fields as necessary. For example, the API_TOKEN can be obtained from Validator Client Authorization Header

   A full example with all possible configuration options can be found here.

   BEACON_URL=http://localhost:5052
   VALIDATOR_URL=http://localhost:5062
   API_TOKEN=R6YhbDO6gKjNMydtZHcaCovFbQ0izq5Hk
   SESSION_PASSWORD=your_password
   

3. You can now start Siren with:

   docker run --rm -ti --name siren --env-file $PWD/.env --net host sigp/siren
   

   Note that, due to the --net=host flag, this will expose Siren on ports 3000, 80, and 443. Preferably, only the latter should be accessible. Adjust your firewall and/or skip the flag wherever possible.

   If it fails to start, an error message will be shown. For example, the error

   http://localhost:5062 unreachable, check settings and connection
   

   means that the validator client is not running, or the --http flag is not provided, or otherwise inaccessible from within the container. Another common error is:

   validator api issue, server response: 403
   

   which means that the API token is incorrect. Check that you have provided the correct token in the field API_TOKEN in .env.

   When Siren has successfully started, you should see the log LOG [NestApplication] Nest application successfully started +118ms, indicating that Siren has started.

4. Siren is now accessible at https://<the-servers-ip> (when used with --net=host). You will get a warning about an invalid certificate, this can be safely ignored.

   Note: We recommend setting a strong password when running Siren to protect it from unauthorized access.

Advanced users can mount their own certificates or disable SSL altogether, see the SSL Certificates section below.

Building From Source

Docker

The docker image can be built with the following command: docker build -f Dockerfile -t siren .

Building locally

To build from source, ensure that your system has Node v18.18 and yarn installed.

Build and run the backend

Navigate to the backend directory cd backend. Install all required Node packages by running yarn. Once the installation is complete, compile the backend with yarn build. Deploy the backend in a production environment, yarn start:production. This ensures optimal performance.

Build and run the frontend

After initializing the backend, return to the root directory. Install all frontend dependencies by executing yarn. Build the frontend using yarn build. Start the frontend production server with yarn start.

This will allow you to access siren at http://localhost:3000 by default.

Advanced configuration

About self-signed SSL certificates

By default, internally, Siren is running on port 80 (plain, behind nginx), port 3000 (plain, direct) and port 443 (with SSL, behind nginx)). Siren will generate and use a self-signed certificate on startup. This will generate a security warning when you try to access the interface. We recommend to only disable SSL if you would access Siren over a local LAN or otherwise highly trusted or encrypted network (i.e. VPN).

Generating persistent SSL certificates and installing them to your system

mkcert is a tool that makes it super easy to generate a self-signed certificate that is trusted by your browser.

To use it for siren, install it following the instructions. Then, run mkdir certs; mkcert -cert-file certs/cert.pem -key-file certs/key.pem 127.0.0.1 localhost (add or replace any IP or hostname that you would use to access it at the end of this command).
To use these generated certificates, add this to to your docker run command: -v $PWD/certs:/certs

The nginx SSL config inside Siren's container expects 3 files: /certs/cert.pem /certs/key.pem /certs/key.pass. If /certs/cert.pem does not exist, it will generate a self-signed certificate as mentioned above. If /certs/cert.pem does exist, it will attempt to use your provided or persisted certificates.

Configuration through environment variables

For those who prefer to use environment variables to configure Siren instead of using an .env file, this is fully supported. In some cases this may even be preferred.

Docker installed through snap

If you installed Docker through a snap (i.e. on Ubuntu), Docker will have trouble accessing the .env file. In this case it is highly recommended to pass the config to the container with environment variables. Note that the defaults in .env.example will be used as fallback, if no other value is provided.