Run Ordhook as a Service using Bitcoind

Prerequisites

Setting up a Bitcoin Node

The Bitcoin Core daemon (bitcoind) is a program that implements the Bitcoin protocol for remote procedure call (RPC) use. Ordhook can be set up to interact with the Bitcoin chainstate through bitcoind's ZeroMQ interface, its embedded networking library, passing raw blockchain data to be evaluated for relevant events.

This guide is written to work with the latest Bitcoin Core software containing bitcoind, Bitcoin Core 25.0.

NOTE:

While bitcoind can and will start syncing a Bitcoin node, customizing this node to your use cases beyond supporting a Ordhook is out of scope for this guide. See the Bitcoin wiki for "Running Bitcoin" or bitcoin.org Running A Full Node guide.

• Make note of the path of your bitcoind executable (located within the bin directory of the bitcoin-25.0 folder you downloaded above appropriate to your operating system)
• Navigate to your project folder where your Ordhook node will reside, create a new file, and rename it to bitcoin.conf. Copy the configuration below to this bitcoin.conf file.
• Find and copy your Bitcoin data directory and paste to the datadir field in the bitcoin.conf file below. Either copy the default path (see list of default directories by operating system) or copy the custom path you set for your Bitcoin data
• Set a username of your choice for bitcoind and use it in the rpcuser configuration below (devnet is a default).
• Set a password of your choice for bitcoind and use it in the rpcpassword configuration below (devnet is a default).

# Bitcoin Core Configuration

datadir=/path/to/bitcoin/directory/ # Path to Bitcoin directory
server=1
rpcuser=devnet
rpcpassword=devnet
rpcport=8332
rpcallowip=0.0.0.0/0
rpcallowip=::/0
txindex=1
listen=1
discover=0
dns=0
dnsseed=0
listenonion=0
rpcserialversion=1
disablewallet=0
fallbackfee=0.00001
rpcthreads=8
blocksonly=1
dbcache=4096

# Start zeromq
zmqpubhashblock=tcp://0.0.0.0:18543

NOTE:

The below command is a startup process that, if this is your first time syncing a node, might take a few hours to a few days to run. Alternatively, if the directory pointed to in the datadir field above contains bitcoin blockchain data, syncing will resume.

Now that you have the bitcoin.conf file ready with the bitcoind configurations, you can run the bitcoind node. The command takes the form path/to/bitcoind -conf=path/to/bitcoin.conf, for example:

/Volumes/SSD/bitcoin-25.0/bin/bitcoind -conf=/Volumes/SSD/project/Ordhook/bitcoin.conf

Once the above command runs, you will see zmq_url entries in the console's stdout, displaying ZeroMQ logs of your bitcoin node.

Configure Ordhook

In this section, you will configure Ordhook to match the network configurations with the bitcoin config file. First, install the latest version of Ordhook.

Next, you will generate a Ordhook.toml file to connect Ordhook with your bitcoind node. Navigate to the directory where you want to generate the Ordhook.toml file and use the following command in your terminal:

ordhook config generate --mainnet

Several network parameters in the generated Ordhook.toml configuration file need to match those in the bitcoin.conf file created earlier in the Setting up a Bitcoin Node section. Please update the following parameters accordingly:

1. Update bitcoind_rpc_username with the username set for rpcuser in bitcoin.conf.
2. Update bitcoind_rpc_password with the password set for rpcpassword in bitcoin.conf.
3. Update bitcoind_rpc_url with the same host and port used for rpcport in bitcoin.conf.

Additionally, if you want to receive events from the configured Bitcoin node, substitute stacks_node_rpc_url with bitcoind_zmq_url, as follows:

[storage]
working_dir = "cache"

# The Http Api allows you to register / deregister
# predicates dynamically.
# This is disabled by default.

# [http_api]
# http_port = 20456
# database_uri = "redis://localhost:6379/"

[network]
mode = "mainnet"
bitcoind_rpc_url = "http://localhost:8332"
bitcoind_rpc_username = "devnet"
bitcoind_rpc_password = "devnet"
# Bitcoin block events can be received by Ordhook
# either through a Bitcoin node's ZeroMQ interface,
# or through the Stacks node. The Stacks node is
# used by default:
# stacks_node_rpc_url = "http://localhost:20443"
# but zmq can be used instead:
bitcoind_zmq_url = "tcp://0.0.0.0:18543"

[limits]
max_number_of_bitcoin_predicates = 100
max_number_of_concurrent_bitcoin_scans = 100
max_number_of_stacks_predicates = 10
max_number_of_concurrent_stacks_scans = 10
max_number_of_processing_threads = 16
max_number_of_networking_threads = 16
max_caching_memory_size_mb = 32000

[[event_source]]
tsv_file_url = "https://archive.hiro.so/mainnet/stacks-blockchain-api/mainnet-stacks-blockchain-api-latest"

Here is a table of the relevant parameters this guide changes in our configuration files.

bitcoin.conf	Ordhook.toml
rpcuser	bitcoind_rpc_username
rpcpassword	bitcoind_rpc_password
rpcport	bitcoind_rpc_url
zmqpubhashblock	bitcoind_zmq_url

Initiate Ordhook Service

In this section, you'll learn how to run Ordhook as a service using Ordhook SDK to post events to a server.

Use the following command to start the Ordhook service for streaming and processing new blocks appended to the Bitcoin blockchain.

ordhook service start --post-to=http://localhost:3000/api/events --config-path=./Ordhook.toml

When the Ordhook service starts, it is initiated in the background to augment the blocks from Bitcoin. Bitcoind sends ZeroMQ notifications to Ordhook to retrieve the inscriptions.

Add http-post endpoints dynamically

To enable dynamically posting endpoints to the server, you can spin up the Redis server by enabling the following lines of code in the Ordhook.toml file.

[http_api]
http_port = 20456
database_uri = "redis://localhost:6379/"

Run ordhook service

Based on the Ordhook.toml file configuration, the ordhook service spins up an HTTP API to manage event destinations. Use the following command to start the ordhook service.

ordhook service start --config-path=./Ordhook.toml

A comprehensive OpenAPI specification explaining how to interact with this HTTP REST API can be found here.