Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority or banks; managing transactions and the issuing of bitcoin is carried out collectively by the network. Bitcoin is open-source; its design is public, nobody owns or controls Bitcoin and everyone can take part. Through many of its unique properties, Bitcoin allows exciting uses that could not be covered by any previous payment system.
This Docker image focuses on providing a very thin image to run and interact
with a Bitcoin ABC node. It is built on Alpine Linux and includes the bitcoin,
bitcoin-cli, and bitcoin-tx binaries. This allows the node to be
lightweight, with minimal dependencies or extra packages.
This image is based on amacneil/docker-bitcoin.
To start a bitcoind instance running the latest version (0.12.2):
$ docker run --name bitcoin-node krobertson/bitcoin-abc
To run a bitcoin container in the background, pass the -d option to docker run:
$ docker run -d --name bitcoin-node krobertson/bitcoin-abc
Once you have a bitcoin service running in the background, you can show running containers:
$ docker ps
Or view the logs of a service:
$ docker logs -f some-bitcoin
To stop and restart a running container:
$ docker stop bitcoin-node
$ docker start bitcoin-node
By default, Docker will create ephemeral containers. That is, the blockchain data will not be persisted if you create a new bitcoin container.
To create a simple busybox data volume and link it to a bitcoin service:
$ docker create -v /data --name btcdata busybox /bin/true
$ docker run --volumes-from btcdata krobertson/bitcoin-abc
The easiest method to configure the bitcoin server is to pass arguments to the
bitcoind command. For example, to run bitcoin on the testnet:
$ docker run --name bitcoin-testnet krobertson/bitcoin-abc bitcoind -testnet