Starting the Nodes

Start your stake pool with systemctl and begin syncing the blockchain!

block producer node

sudo systemctl start cardano-node

relaynode1

Congratulations! Your nodes are running successfully. Synchronizing your local copies of the Cardano blockchain ledger with the network may take more than 24 hours. As of August 2025, the size of the Cardano Mainnet blockchain ledger is approximately 215 GB.

To monitor your Cardano nodes, install gLiveView.

gLiveView displays crucial node status information and works well with systemd services.

cd $NODE_HOME
sudo apt install bc tcptraceroute jq -y
curl -s -o gLiveView.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cardano-community/guild-operators/master/scripts/cnode-helper-scripts/gLiveView.sh
curl -s -o env https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cardano-community/guild-operators/master/scripts/cnode-helper-scripts/env
chmod 755 gLiveView.sh

To modify env with the updated file locations, type the following command where <ConfigFileName> is config-bp.json on your block-producing node and config.json on all your relay nodes

sed -i env \
    -e "s/\#CONFIG=\"\${CNODE_HOME}\/files\/config.json\"/CONFIG=\"\${NODE_HOME}\/<ConfigFileName>\"/g" \
    -e "s/\#SOCKET=\"\${CNODE_HOME}\/sockets\/node.socket\"/SOCKET=\"\${NODE_HOME}\/db\/socket\"/g"

For complete documentation from the developer on using the gLiveView script and env file, visit Guild Operators.

A node must synchronize to epoch 208 (Shelley launch) before gLiveView.sh can start tracking the synchronization process. Before your node synchronizes to epoch 208, you can track node synchronization using the following command:

journalctl --unit=cardano-node --follow

****✨ Pro tip: If you synchronize a node, then you can copy the database directory to a different computer to save time synchronizing another node.

Run gLiveView to monitor the progress of the local Cardano Node synchronizing with the blockchain.

./gLiveView.sh

The following figure illustrates sample output of the gLiveView dashboard when Cardano Node is operating as a relay.