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4 <title>Running Tahoe</title>
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12 <h1>How To Start Tahoe</h1>
14 <p>This is how to run a Tahoe node or a complete Tahoe grid. First you
15 have to install the Tahoe source code, as documented in <a
16 href="install.html">install.html</a>.</p>
18 <p>The <cite>tahoe</cite> executable is used to create, start, and stop
19 nodes. Each node lives in a separate base directory, inside of which you
20 can add files to configure the node. Nodes also read and write files
21 within that directory.</p>
23 <p>A grid consists of a single Introducer and one or more nodes. If you
24 are creating a new grid, you'll need to create both an Introducer and a
25 node (and then invite other people to create their own nodes and join
26 your grid). If you are joining an existing grid (such as <a
27 href="http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/TestGrid">the public test
28 grid</a>), the Introducer will already be running, and you'll need to
31 <p>To construct a node run <cite>tahoe create-client</cite>, which will
32 create <cite>~/.tahoe</cite> to be the node's base directory. Acquire a copy
33 of the <cite>introducer.furl</cite> from the introducer and put it into this
34 directory, then run <cite>tahoe start</cite>. After that, the node should be
35 off and running. The first thing it will do is connect to the introducer and
36 get itself connected to all other nodes on the grid.</p>
38 <p>To construct an introducer, create a new base directory for it (the name
39 of the directory is up to you), cd into it, and run <cite>tahoe
40 create-introducer .</cite>. Now start the introducer by running <cite>tahoe
41 start .</cite>. After it starts, there will be a file named
42 <cite>introducer.furl</cite> in that base directory. This file contains
43 the URL which the nodes must use in order to connect to this
48 <p>Now you have a decentralized filesystem. See <a href="using.html">using.html</a> for instructions about how to interact with it.</p>