Bee Clef
info
Bee Clef is deprecated and is no longer under active development. It is not required for running a Bee node.
Bee makes use of Go Ethereum's external signer, Clef.
Because Bee must sign a lot of transactions automatically and quickly, a Bee specific version of Clef, Bee Clef has been packaged which includes all the relevant configuration needed to make Clef work with Bee.
caution
Bee Clef will create a new Ethereum key pair for you during installation. Make sure you keep a backup of your key pair somewhere safe and secure!
Packages#
Bee Clef can be installed automatically using your system's package manager.
- Ubuntu / Debian / Raspbian
- CentOS
- MacOS
Configuring Bee Clef#
Configuration files are stored in /etc/default/bee-clef/ on Linux and /usr/local/etc/swarm-clef/default on MacOS.
To install clef for Swarm mainnet, change BEE_CLEF_CHAIN_ID to be 100 in order to interact with the xDAI network. For testnet, use chain id 5.
For a normal installation using a package manager, this should be the only configuration changes necessary to start using Bee Clef.
Interact With Bee Clef#
Once Bee Clef has been installed, it will begin running as a service.
To check Bee Clef is running ok, we may use systemctl (on Linux) or launchctl (on MacOS) to query the status of the bee-clef service.
- Linux
- MacOS
And if you want to get Bee Clef's logs, you can use:
When Bee Clef first starts, you should see something very similar to the following:
info
This line can be safely ignored, there is no action required: {"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"ui_onInputRequired","params":[{"title":"Master Password","prompt":"Please enter the password to decrypt the master seed","isPassword":true}]}
As soon as bee starts interacting with bee-clef you should start to see log messages populate, for a regularly active and connected node they will appear every few seconds:
Data Locations#
Key material and other data is stored in /var/lib/bee-clef/
info
Bee can communicate with Bee Clef in a variety of ways. The default way, if installed via the packages, will use an Inter-process communication (IPC) file. This is a special file that bee-clef creates on startup that Bee will use to send requests back-and-forth. When the bee-clef service is running you'll notice that a /var/lib/bee-clef/clef.ipc file is created.
Manual Installation#
Try the Github releases page for binaries for your platform. Otherwise to install Clef manually first retrieve the relevant Clef binary from Ethereum's Geth & Tools download page, or build directly from the source.
Because Bee needs Clef to sign many transactions automatically, we must run Clef as a service with relaxed permissions and rules set. To ensure Clef only signs transactions from Bee, we must protect the clef.ipc file by creating a Bee user and setting permissions so that it is only possible for this user to make use of the ipc socket.
Additionally, Clef requires transaction signatures for the Bee's chequebook interaction.
A shell script automating the post-initialisation permission changing and including the Clef config, clef-service, as well as the 4byte.json transaction signature file and rules.js file can all be found in the bee-clef repository.
Finally, once Clef is running, simply configure your Bee node to enable Clef using --clef-signer-enable and point Bee to the correct ipc socket using --clef-signer-endpoint.