Installation

Selecting the right installation method for the hydra-node depends on your requirements and technical preferences. Below are the primary methods to get started quickly and efficiently.

Docker

The quickest way to install and run a hydra-node is by using Docker images:

docker pull ghcr.io/cardano-scaling/hydra-node
docker run --rm ghcr.io/cardano-scaling/hydra-node --help

The hydra-node image is published for linux/amd64 and linux/arm64, so the above pulls the image native to your machine. The hydra-tui, hydraw and hydra-chain-observer images are published for linux/amd64 only. Running those on an arm64 host needs emulation, which Docker Desktop sets up for you but a plain Linux install does not, unless qemu-user-static binfmt handlers are registered.

Dependencies

There is one run-time dependency of hydra-node:

• etcd used internally to create a reliable network between nodes

You can ignore this if you are using the Docker image.

Prebuilt binaries

We provide binaries of hydra-node and hydra-tui for x86_64 Linux, aarch64 Linux and ARM64 MacOS platforms. These binaries are available as attachments in our GitHub releases. The x86_64 Linux ones are statically linked; the aarch64 Linux ones are not, as there is no musl cross build for that platform yet.

info

Recent versions of MacOS block unverified binaries to protect your system.

Apple cannot verify that "hydra-node" is free of malware that may harm your Mac or compromise your privacy.

To proceed, you’ll need to allow it manually in the Privacy & Security section of your system settings.

Build from source

While using Docker is the recommended way to use Hydra, you can also build the hydra-node from source. We recommend using Nix for this and you can find instructions in our contributing guidelines.