Bitcoin Forum

After setting up my VPS as a full node, I thought it would be nice if I had some way of displaying it to the world.

My Node

https://odin.vikingserv.net

GitHub Code: https://github.com/craigwatson/bitcoind-status
Travis CI: https://travis-ci.org/craigwatson/bitcoind-status

Donations

BTC donations are also graciously accepted both direct to 174N2KwMzKYvYkCSx1kezrzfSQuJQEZY9T and also via ChangeTip (http://craigwatson1987.tip.me)  :)

TL;DR - Main Features

• List of connected nodes, with optional geolocation
• Simple file-based cache system to limit RPC calls
• Ships with two different CSS styles - "light" (default) and "dark"
• Generates and displays a donation QR code for donations
• IP-based whitelist for clearing/bypassing the cache
• Displays historical number of connections (requires the use of a stats-collecting cron job)
• Displays graph showing peer type breakdown over time (requires the use of another stats-collecting cron job)

Full Features List

• Peer list is filterable - you can ignore a set list of peer IPs and also Tor peers
• Extra agent strings can be added to the peer type graph
• Fully responsive mobile design, including connected nodes table
• Can bypass the file-based cache system entirely
• Displays free disk space
• Can either display the node's IP address via the PHP $_SERVER variable, or from the Bitcoin Daemon
• Display if the node is running on testnet
• Display the currently running Bitcoind version
• Optionally display the remote port when listing connected peers.
• IP-based geolocation flags for both node and peer IP addresses
• Optional "Fork me on GitHub" ribbon (toggleable via config.php, enabled by default)
• Testing includes PHP syntax checking and PEAR standards compliance

Please note that disabling the cache could overload your Bitcoind with RPC calls, and also cause geolocation errors (the current geolocation provider is rate-limited to 120 requests per minute). Please use with caution!

I'd really appreciate it if everyone could keep the ribbon enabled to try and boost exposure for the code :)

Contributions

Please feel free to comment, suggest (or better still, contribute!) new features or improvements.

Wanted - PHP Test Writers!

I'd like to get more test coverage of my code to make contributions even easier - if anyone has any experience in writing PHP tests (either PHPunit or something else), please reach out.

I was about to suggest a cache, then I read your post again :D

nice one

Looks nice! I'll have a look, maybe put it on my node.

Very Nice, It might be nice to show some Peer Info, Who is connected, What version of bitcoind they use etc.

I can fork your code and add this if you like, You are welcome to use it.

MrF

Just added this - bit of a hacky implementation as it's not responsive, but responsive tables are annoying as hell :)

No thats good, Looks really neat.

Good Job :)

Would be nice to have multiple themes :) I will use this for my full node.

Submitted a pull request with some potential improvements just now :)

This is fantastic. Likely going to fork it to use for a cryptocurrency I've been supporting and running nodes for.  ;)

Just improved a few things, including handling errors from RPC and responsifying the peer information tables, check out the live copy here: https://loki.vikingserv.net

A full README is next on the list! :)


Thanks, much appreciated - please feel free to tip/donate if you find it useful :)


Pull request merged :)

Would you consider adding something in the config files that would give users the option of displaying the connected user's IPs?

It already exists, just flip the 'display_peer_info' switch to TRUE -  a full readme is on the way though :) :)

Reference: https://github.com/craigwatson/bitcoind-status/blob/master/php/config.php#L20

My bad, I meant to not display it, but I see I can just ensure that's set to false.

You need to sanitize the protocol subversion before displaying it to users.

Any particular reason?

Nevermind, the client does it for you these days: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/a946aa8d3ec7009ac670eeb65a525efe5eeb6e84

I haven't been around for a while.

Welcome back :P

something new, time to give it a shot.

This fix was made at version 0.9 (if I read it correctly). When doing a "getpeerlist" on my own client (or visiting CraigWatson's status page), I see some clients still having <0.9.
I think htmlspecialchars() shouldn't hurt. It's better than potentially endangering webmasters who integrates the status page on a <0.9 node.

Well, I just setup a Bitcoin node, just give this try this. I have always wanted to run a Bitcoin node so now I had a reason to do so. The status page can be found here: click (http://94.23.146.127/status/). Bitcoind is still syncing blocks though and has been doing so for the last 12 hours.

Awesome, great to know the page is being used.

I've just updated the code with a better Readme and wrapped the node sub-version in htmlspecialchars :)

Ah alright, going to pull again than. Setting it up was really easy, but I'm a Web dev so I guess it should be easy for me :P

can you add FREE DISK SPACE ?


LIVE DEMO: http://btcaudio.eu/node/

Added, with feature switch :)

Also added: geolocation feature :)

Thanks to a few more pull requests, we now have a few new features!

• Can bypass the file-based cache system entirely -- please note that this could overload your Bitcoind with RPC calls, please use with caution!
  
• Display if the node is running on testnet.
• Display the currently running Bitcoind version

Cheers for the comments and contributions - all are greatly appreciated :)

No problem ;)

Removed (by default) the remote port when displaying connected nodes.

As with most of the page's functionality, it's easily toggled via the config.php file :)

Good work.

I noticed this "Free Disk Space: 19.39 GB" on https://loki.vikingserv.net/.

Is that supposed to be the size of the block chain? If so, you might want to  rephrase the label?

Also, shorena made some scripts, check these:
http://node.cryptowatch.com/
http://213.165.91.169/

I got the script for making graphs sent to me by Shorena, I could make it available if others want it too. Not sure if Shorena already made it available.

For those interested, there's also apparently a "high score list".

Check out these links:
https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/
https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/nodes/leaderboard/

It is possible to check your node on the leaderboard to see how you fare.

That's the amount of free disk space left on the node, so basically "the amount the blockchain can grow before I run out of space". Purely vanity and has no real purpose - but as with most things, can be controlled with a toggle switch in config.


The graphs look nice, though I guess it's beyond the scope of this app for the moment - would be nice for a 2.0 release though! Would be interested to see what the code to generate the graphs is like - if you can check if Shorena is happy for the scripts to be made open source (a pre-requisite for the project) that would be awesome :)


Nice, I may add this in future :)

It's pretty nice.
I'm going to see if I can get my router to point to my node and display the results.

Yeah sure you can share the scripts with anyone. If you notice my name or link to my profile/node thats nice, but its not required. Best fitting license would probably be WTFPL or CC0. The little I wrote is public here -> http://213.165.91.169/whatdo.txt

Just a heads up though: I recently shared the complete collection of shell scripts and cronjobs with someone. Its currently not working even though they use the same Linux flavour. So you might have to look into rrdtool after all if you want something similar. Im currently[1] working on a ruby script that can feed several databases with a single request. Not sure where I will share it once its done, but Ill let you know somehow.


[1] a few lines a week, might take a while :(

This is a very interesting script thanks for making this. I am thinking about making a btc node because it has always been on my mind, but I never wanted to risk making one. Now I think I may make one just for the support of bitcoin.

Some more minor revisions:

I've reworked the CSS to be slightly flatter and more modern, and shipped with two different styles - "light" (default) and "dark" (viewable on my demo (https://loki.vikingserv.net)) - just edit config.php.

I've also added a "Fork me on GitHub" ribbon (toggleable via config.php) - I'd really appreciate it if everyone could keep the ribbon enabled to try and boost exposure for the code :)

CraigWatson, will update my node right now and keep in the ribbon. ;)

EDIT: Done.

I've now added Travis CI testing (https://travis-ci.org/craigwatson/bitcoind-status), including PHP syntax checking and PEAR standards compliance - should hopefully make contributions easier :)

Can this be used with other cryptocurrencies?

It can indeed, as long as they respond over RPC in the same way bitcoind does - I know for a fact that the page works with the LTC node, and should work for most altcoins.

Ok, thank you :) I'll try fiddling with this in the next few days...

hi craig,

I noticed this site, some 1/2 a year or so ago and relocated it after seeing your topic here;

http://176.10.116.242/xbt_cgi/node_status.pl?sortfield=syncnode&sortdirection=1

this is something (the stats from bitcoind) that you could easily incorporate into what you have already, I'd think..

All done - see my node at https://loki.vikingserv.net :)

Code is also updated on GitHub :)

Apologies for the double-post, but I've also added a little Monday present - geolocation-based flags for both the node and peer IP addresses :)

Demo: https://loki.vikingserv.net

Nice! I already added something like that to my node, but it isn't as sophisticated, haha. Will update my node in a bit.

EDIT: Done. However, it seems that "Time Connected", "Last Send" and "Last Receive" doesn't work.
EDIT2: Your config.sample.php does not contain the "geolocate_peer_ip" option.

Re: EDIT1: You may need to refresh your cache. The data comes from the getinfo() RPC call, so I'd suggest turning on debug mode and checking the output inside the HTML comment.
Re: EDIT2 - Strange, It's in the version on GitHub here: https://github.com/craigwatson/bitcoind-status/blob/master/php/config.sample.php#L31

1. I've cleared my cache multiple times, but that didn't the problem. What is the version of your bitcoind?
2. And I guess I fucked up the pull than, my bad!

Well, I just pulled again, removed everything but my config, redid my config and now it works. I guess I fucked it up somewhere along the line. :P

Just a quick bump - since my last update there's been a couple of minor improvements to the status page.

It can now report the bitcoin daemon uptime (though only on Linux systems), and you can also toggle displaying the node's IP off altogether.

As always, tips/comments/pull requests are appreciated :)

Typically, you'll need to put the folder in /var/www on your server - this is normally where Apache serves content from. That said, you'll need to check the Apache configuration as it can vary from system to system.

You can also change Apache's configuration to serve content from a totally different directory (e.g. /srv/www) as long as the filesystem permissions allow Apache read access.

Apache will also need write access to wherever you configure it to place the cache files - I've set the default to be /tmp but this is cleared after every reboot, so it may not be appropriate in all cases.

Did this break your live demo?

Apologies - I reinstalled my servers a while back. The whole server is Puppetised and the status page config isn't (or at least wasn't) so it got missed - good spot!

I've temporarily stopped bitcoind on the boxes as it was making them quite swappy.

I've also added a slightly nicer error message when the config file isn't found, so it doesn't fall through to the PHP error.

Be nice if I could run a version on windows :D

You should be able to run this on Windows - as long as you have PHP with the curl extension installed, plus a compatible webserver such as Apache.

The communication with bitcoind is done via RPC so there's no underlying Linux system calls done for the core functionality. The only OS-level Linux commands run are to get various system stats like disk usage, daemon uptime etc.

OK, apologies for the double-post and bump, but in the interest of keeping the thread updated, I have made the following minor changes to the status page (thanks to Audun Larsen (https://github.com/xqus) for the pull requests!):

• Peer Geolocation: Country flag now displays the full country name on mouseover
• Peer List: You can now ignore/filter the peer list by IP (in addition to the existing feature to ignore all Tor peers)
• Peer List: Peers now have an inbound/outbound connection identifier
• Peer List: Peer connected time and last send/receive are now relative times (i.e. "x minutes", rather than absolute timestamps
• Bitnodes API: Corrected the Bitnodes API URL (removing the getaddr part which is no longer used)
• Settings: You can now hard-code the PHP timezone if you don't have it set in php.ini

No need to apologize, as you are allowed to bump your own thread, as long as there is 24 hours between your previous post and the new one. ;)

Very good, wish i had the skills to do that....... well done sir  ;)

Thats a great idea for a website, A site where nodes could register and receive donations from bitcoin users.  or a node pool where donations are spread among nodes depending on uptime.... maybe that already exists ?

Thanks :)

There already is a site where users can register Bitcoin addresses alongside their nodes - bitnodes.21.co.

It's not really exposed (you have to drill into the node details to see the address) but the data is there :)

My nodes:

https://bitnodes.21.co/nodes/188.65.59.69-8333/
https://bitnodes.21.co/nodes/185.122.56.197-8333/
https://bitnodes.21.co/nodes/31.220.7.136-8333/

This thing works great once I got everything worked out with the settings!

Thanks for creating and maintaining it.

Is this good for php 7.x (I'm running 7.0.11) ?

This does indeed work with PHP7, my test node (https://odin.vikingserv.net) is running 7.0.10 :)

Thread bump and feature update, you can now configure extra node types to graph via an array in the config file  ;D

See my node (https://odin.vikingserv.net) for an example (I've added breadwallet and bither clients to the default Core/Classic/BitcoinJ set).

I am struggling with this.  my vps gets a 500 error.

Is there anything in your PHP logs to check what the issue is? HTTP 500 errors are usually served when there's a configuration issue.

For example, is the curl library installed for PHP?

That was it.  Curl_init was blowing up.  While I had curl installed, I did not have curl-php.


I have this up and running on my dogenode and litenode now.  Very nice!  Now I have to figure out how to get that swanky dark screen working =)

Thank you for your hard work!