monero-pool

A Monero mining pool server written in C.

Design decisions are focused on performance and efficiency, hence the use of libevent and LMDB. Currently it uses only two threads (one for the stratum clients and one for the web UI clients). It gets away with this thanks to the efficiency of libevent (for the stratum clients) and some sensible proxying/caching being placed in front of the web UI.

The single payout mechanism is PPLNS, which favors loyal pool miners.

I have no plans to add any other payout mechanisms or other coins. Work should stay focussed on performance, efficiency and stability.

The pool also now supports a new, experimental and optional, method of mining for the pool miners, whereby miners can select their own block template to mine on. Further information can be found in stratum-ss.md.

Project status

I have tested this quite a bit on the Monero testnet (if you plan to do the same, ensure to use --testnet flag when starting your wallet and daemon) and mainnet, but there is always room for improvement.

There is also a reference mainnet pool setup and running at http://monerop.com.

If you want to help with testing or help setting up your own pool, give me a shout on IRC: jtgrassie on Freenode.

Compiling from source

Dependencies

The build system now requires the Monero source tree to be cloned and compiled. Follow the instructions for compiling Monero, then export the following variable:

export MONERO_ROOT=/path/to/cloned/monero

Replacing the path appropriately.

Beyond the Monero dependencies, the following extra libraries are also required to build the pool:

• liblmdb
• libevent
• json-c
• uuid

As an example, on Ubuntu, these dependencies can be installed with the following command:

sudo apt-get install liblmdb-dev libevent-dev libjson-c-dev uuid-dev

Compile

First install all the dependencies as described above.

Then to compile the pool as a release build, run:

make release

The application will be built in build/release/.

Optionally you can compile a debug build by simply running:

make

Debug builds are output in build/debug/.

Configuration

Copy and edit the pool.conf file to either the same directory as the compiled binary monero-pool, or place it in your home directory or launch monero-pool with the flag --config-file path/to/pool.conf to use a custom location. The configuration options should be self explanatory.

Block notification

There is one configuration option that deserves a special mention.

You can optionally start the pool with the flag --block-notified (or set in the config file: block-notified = 1). This will prevent the pool from polling for new blocks using a timer, and instead, fetch a new block template when it receives a signal (specifically, SIGUSR1). Now whenever you start monerod, you'll make use of its --block-notify option.

E.g.

monerod ... --block-notify '/usr/bin/pkill -USR1 monero-pool'

This instructs monerod to send the required signal, SIGUSR1, to your pool whenever a new block is added to the chain.

Using this mechanism has a significant benefit - your pool immediatley knows when to fetch a new block template to send to your miners. You're essentially giving your miners a head-start over miners in pools which use polling (which is what all the other pool implementations do).

Running

Ensure you have your Monero daemon (monerod) and wallet RPC (monero-wallet-rpc) up and running with the correct host and port settings as defined in the pool config file.

It is highly recommended to run these on the same host as the pool server to avoid network latency when their RPC methods are called.

Then simply cd build/debug|release and run ./monero-pool.

Web UI

There is a minimal web UI that gets served on the port specified in the config file. It's advisable to use either Apache or Nginx as a proxy in front of this with some appropriate caching.

SSL

The pool has been tested behind both HAProxy and stunnel, so if you wish to provide SSL access to the pool, these are both good options and simple to setup. The reference pool makes use of HAProxy and port 4343 for SSL traffic.

The web UI, as mentioned above, should ideally be placed behind a caching proxy. Therefore SSL termination should be be configured there (i.e. in Apache/Nginx).

Supporting the project

This mining pool has no built-in developer donation (like other mining pool software has), so if you use it and want to donate, XMR donations to:

451ytzQg1vUVkuAW73VsQ72G96FUjASi4WNQse3v8ALfjiR5vLzGQ2hMUdYhG38Fi15eJ5FJ1ZL4EV1SFVi228muGX4f3SV

would be very much appreciated.

License

Please see the LICENSE file.