Advanced Installation | Chia Documentation (2024)

There are various ways to install Chia, with the best method depending on what you intend to do:

• If you simply wish to use the Chia wallet, or to run a farm on a single personal computer, then we recommend installing the GUI from our official downloads page for Windows and MacOS, and for Linux users to install the package as described below. The GUI is the simplest way to interact with the Chia client and ideal for most non-developer use cases.

• If you intend to run a dedicated Chia full node on a server and connect to it programmatically using the RPC interface, the best method would be to install and run Chia via the command line on a proper server environment.

• If you intend to do Chialisp development or build projects that leverage Chia, you have the options of either using an installer (the recommended pattern), or installing from source.

• Lastly, if you plan on making contributions to the source code, then installing Chia from source would be your path.

In summary, unless you already knew before reading this page that you should be installing from source, chances are your best path will be to install from our official downloads page or a Linux package, depending on your OS.

System Requirements​

The minimum supported specs are that of the Raspberry Pi 4, 4GB model:

• Quad core 1.5Ghz CPU (must be 64 bit)
• 4 GB RAM
• As of Chia version 2.0, Python versions 3.8 and later are supported

Drive Format​

Chia plot files are at least 108GB in size (for K32). To plot successfully requires drives formatted to support large files. Formats that will work include NTFS, APFS, exFAT, and ext4. Do not use drives with FAT formatting (for example FAT12, FAT16, and FAT32), or else plotting will fail. Future versions of Chia will check for unsupported drives, but for now it's up to each user to check their drive format.

Sleep kills plots​

If the computer or hard drives go to sleep during the plotting process, it will fail, and you will need to start over. Please ensure all sleep, hibernate and power saving modes for your computer and hard drives are disabled before starting the Chia plotting process. In the future, Chia will have a resume plot feature. In the meantime, if you do get a failed plot, delete all *.tmp files before starting a new plot.

Install​

Using the CLI​

This method is intended for linux environments

# Install packages
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl gnupg

# Add GPG key
curl -sL https://repo.chia.net/FD39E6D3.pubkey.asc | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/chia.gpg

# Set up repository
echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/chia.gpg] https://repo.chia.net/debian/ stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/chia.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-get update

# Install chia-blockchain
sudo apt-get install chia-blockchain

# Use chia-blockchain-cli instead for CLI only

From Source​

This method is primarily intended for contributing to the Chia codebase

# Download chia-blockchain
git clone https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain -b latest --recurse-submodules

# Change directory
cd chia-blockchain

# Install dependencies
sh install.sh

# Activate virtual environment
. ./activate

# Initialize
chia init

# Change directory
cd chia-blockchain

# Activate the virtual environment
. ./activate

# Stop running services
chia stop -d all

# Deactivate the virtual environment
deactivate

# Remove the current virtual environments
rm -r venv
rm -r .penv
rm -r .venv

# Pull the latest version
git fetch
git checkout latest
git reset --hard FETCH_HEAD --recurse-submodules

# If you get RELEASE.dev0 then delete the package-lock.json in chia-blockchain-gui and install.sh again

# This should say "nothing to commit, working tree clean"
# if you have uncommitted changes, RELEASE.dev0 will be reported
git status

# Install the new version
sh install.sh

# Activate the virtual environment
. ./activate

# Initialize the new version
chia init

Raspberry Pi 4​

Swap​

It is suggested that you set up 1024 MiB of swap:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap bs=1M count=1024
sudo chmod 600 /swap
sudo mkswap /swap
sudo swapon /swap

/swap swap swap defaults 0 0

Setup​

Run the following commands to prepare for installation:

# Requirements to compile the blockchain
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential python3-dev

# If you are not using Raspbian 64, add this
export PIP_EXTRA_INDEX_URL=https://www.piwheels.org/simple/

# Make sure you have 64-bit Python 3.8 or later
python3 -c 'import platform; print(platform.architecture())'

Proceed​

Finally, follow the typical from source installation for Linux to continue.

Disable Timelord​

This is not necessary when installing from source.

However, if you install Chia in some other way, disable the timelord build process:

export BUILD_VDF_CLIENT=N

Other environments​