Node startup

Supported networks

Ethrex is designed to support Ethereum mainnet and its testnets

These are the only names --network accepts. Any other value is treated as a path to a genesis file, so a network without a preset must be started with --network <genesis.json> --bootnodes <enode,...>.

For more information about sync modes please read the sync modes document. Snap syncing is the default; to switch to full sync use the flag --syncmode full. Full sync is not possible on a fresh mainnet or sepolia database, since ethrex only executes post-merge blocks.

Run an Ethereum node

This guide will assume that you already installed ethrex and you know how to set up a consensus client to communicate with ethrex.

To sync with mainnet

ethrex

To sync with sepolia

ethrex --network sepolia

To sync with hoodi

ethrex --network hoodi

Once started, you should be able to check the sync status with:

curl http://localhost:8545 \
    -H 'content-type: application/json' \
    -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"eth_syncing","params":[],"id":1}'

The answer should be:

{"id":1,"jsonrpc":"2.0","result":{"startingBlock":"0x0","currentBlock":"0x0","highestBlock":"0x0"}}

Run an Ethereum node with Docker

You can simply start a node with a Consensus client and ethrex as Execution client with Docker using the docker-compose.yaml

curl -L -o docker-compose.yaml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lambdaclass/ethrex/refs/heads/main/docker-compose.yaml
docker compose up

Or you can set a different network:

ETHREX_NETWORK=hoodi docker compose up

For more details and configuration options:

• Configuration
• CLI reference