Advanced Installation
This page will go into the details of the various different ways to install Chia. If you already installed Chia as part of the Farming Guide, then feel free to skip ahead to the Plotting Basics page.
There are various ways to install Chia, with the best method depending on what you intend to do:
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If you simply wish to use the Chia wallet, or to run a farm on a single personal computer, then we recommend installing the GUI from our official downloads page for Windows and MacOS, and for Linux users to install the package as described below. The GUI is the simplest way to interact with the Chia client and ideal for most non-developer use cases.
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If you intend to run a dedicated Chia full node on a server and connect to it programmatically using the RPC interface, the best method would be to install and run Chia via the command line on a proper server environment.
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If you intend to do Chialisp development or build projects that leverage Chia, you have the options of either using an installer (the recommended pattern), or installing from source.
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Lastly, if you plan on making contributions to the source code, then installing Chia from source would be your path.
In summary, unless you already knew before reading this page that you should be installing from source, chances are your best path will be to install from our official downloads page or a Linux package, depending on your OS.
System Requirements
The minimum supported specs are that of the Raspberry Pi 4, 4GB model:
- Quad core 1.5Ghz CPU (must be 64 bit)
- 4 GB RAM
- As of Chia version 2.0, Python versions 3.8 and later are supported
Drive Format
Chia plot files are at least 108GB in size (for K32). To plot successfully requires drives formatted to support large files. Formats that will work include NTFS, APFS, exFAT, and ext4. Do not use drives with FAT formatting (for example FAT12, FAT16, and FAT32), or else plotting will fail. Future versions of Chia will check for unsupported drives, but for now it's up to each user to check their drive format.
Sleep kills plots
If the computer or hard drives go to sleep during the plotting process, it will fail, and you will need to start over. Please ensure all sleep, hibernate and power saving modes for your computer and hard drives are disabled before starting the Chia plotting process. In the future, Chia will have a resume plot feature. In the meantime, if you do get a failed plot, delete all *.tmp
files before starting a new plot.
Install
Using the CLI
This method is intended for linux environments
- APT
- YUM
- DNF
- PIP
# Install packages
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl gnupg
# Add GPG key
curl -sL https://repo.chia.net/FD39E6D3.pubkey.asc | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/chia.gpg
# Set up repository
echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/chia.gpg] https://repo.chia.net/debian/ stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/chia.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-get update
# Install chia-blockchain
sudo apt-get install chia-blockchain
# Use chia-blockchain-cli instead for CLI only
# Install packages
sudo yum install -y yum-utils
sudo yum-config-manager --add-repo https://repo.chia.net/rhel/chia-blockchain.repo
# Install chia-blockchain
sudo yum install chia-blockchain
# Use chia-blockchain-cli for CLI only
# Install packages
sudo dnf install 'dnf-command(config-manager)'
sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo https://repo.chia.net/rhel/chia-blockchain.repo
# Install chia-blockchain
sudo dnf install chia-blockchain
# Use chia-blockchain-cli for CLI only
Make sure you have Python 3.10 and Git installed.
# Create virtual environment
python -m venv venv
# Activate virtual environment
. ./venv/bin/activate # MacOS / Linux
./venv/Scripts/Activate.ps1 # Windows
# Update pip
pip install --upgrade pip
# Install chia-blockchain
pip install --extra-index-url https://pypi.chia.net/simple chia-blockchain miniupnpc
Chia strives to provide binary wheels for modern systems. If your system does not have binary wheels, you may need to install development tools to build some Python extensions from source. If you're attempting to install from source, setting the environment variable BUILD_VDF_CLIENT
to N
will skip trying to build Timelord components that aren't very cross platform, e.g. export BUILD_VDF_CLIENT=N
.