Start a New Ethereum Private Network

Ethereum Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Start a New Ethereum Private Network

This section describes how to start a new Ethereum private network.

If you want to start a new private Ethereum network with "geth (Go Ethereum)", you need at least 2 pieces of information:

1. Giving a unique network ID. "geth" has 4 built-in network IDs to identify 4 public Ethereum networks:

--networkid <id>

   where id is one of: 
      1 - Frontier, the main Ethereum network
      2 - Morden, disused now 
      3 - Ropsten, the test network, "testnet"
      4 - Rinkeby, the second test network

You chose any ID value higher than 4 for your private network. For example, 314:

geth --networkid 314

   specifying a new ID for the "geth" Ethereum to join or create.

2. Giving a unique data directory where private network blockchain will be stored.

geth --datadir \herong\Ethereum\personal

Here is what I did to start my own personal Ethereum network:

C:\> \herong\bin\geth.exe console --networkid 314 
   --datadir \herong\Ethereum\personal 
   2>> ether-personal.log

instance: Geth/v1.8.1-stable-1e67410e/windows-386/go1.9.2
 modules: admin:1.0 debug:1.0 eth:1.0 miner:1.0 net:1.0 personal:1.0 
 rpc:1.0 txpool:1.0 web3:1.0