Configuration · bPanel

bPanel can be configured to connect to any bcoin-API compatible node you want to point it to. Save as many different conf files as you want and easily point your bPanel app to refer to any node you want, not just the docker container created by the default docker-compose.yml configurations.

How bPanel Connects to Nodes

Since bPanel just uses bclient to connect to and query nodes, all you need to do is pass the appropriate congifurations when starting up bPanel. This can be done via the command line, environment variables (prefaced with BPANEL_), or through a configuration file. Under the hood, bPanel uses the bcfg module to accomplish this. Learn more about bcfg here.

Client Configurations

bPanel looks for configuration files in your home directory in ~/.bpanel. This can be changed by passing a prefix argument at runtime. Client configurations for connecting to different nodes are loaded from the clients directory, ~/.bpanel/clients/[CLIENT-ID].conf.

You can have as many different configurations as you want. bPanel will default to a default.conf configuration. To use different configurations, just pass in a client-id argument at runtime. e.g. npm start -- --client-id=test (or as an env variable BPANEL_CLIENT_ID=test) which will load configs from ~/.bpanel/clients/test.conf.

The clients directory can also be customized with the clients-dir argument.

Sample conf files for the client can be found here.

Since node and wallet services are run on different servers, you will likely need different configurations to connect to the wallet. These should be in the same client conf file, prefaced with wallet- (note that bcoin looks for these in separate config files). See the sample conf file for an example.

Configuration between Docker services

About the Docker Environment

There are three docker services in the compose file: bpanel, bcoin and securityc. The bpanel service is an http server that acts as a static file server and as a request router to backend services as well as a webpack process for building your js files. The bcoin service is an instance of bcoin that supports an http server, a wallet server and a bitcoin p2p server.

The securityc service generates TLS keys and certs and runs a TLS terminating reverse proxy. You can use custom configs to connect to an existing node, or use the bcoin docker service to spin up a bcoin node that the webapp will connect to.

Configuring Docker Services

These instructions are for if you want to run bPanel within the bpanel service and have it talk to a bcoin node running in a container from the bcoin service. For example, this is how bPanel works out of the box if you simply run docker-compose up -d.

Configurations are shared between the two docker containers using a shared docker volume called configs. Settings for the bcoin nodes in docker are set using environment variables, either in docker-compose.yml or an env file (by default in /etc/bcoin.env but you can point to whichever and as many env files as you want using the env_file configuration in the bcoin service). The bcoin node is started with the bcoin-init.js script. During this process, api keys are generated and all required configurations are saved in a config file called _docker.conf in the shared volume.

If the configs volume is mounted to your host machine, you can connect a local version of bPanel to it by pointing the client-id config at _docker and it will use the appropriate configs.

If you are mounting a local bcoin data dir (~/.bcoin) or persisting using docker volumes, you can also pass settings to your bcoin docker container with a bcoin.conf file (read more about bcoin configurations here).

Bcoin Setup Scripts

(This section is only relevant if you will be running a bcoin node in a docker container using the bcoin service, or using the bcoin-init.js script to start a node.)

This setup supports setup scripts for your bcoin node. This will allow you to run scripts on your node for a repeatable and predictable environment for testing or development.

Three circumstances need to be met to run a script:

There needs to be a js file to run in the scripts directory that exports a function
You need to pass the name of this file (including the extension) as an environment variable named BCOIN_INIT_SCRIPT in the docker-compose or as a init-script setting in your bcoin.conf file
There should be no walletdb in the container. This last requirement makes sure that a setup script doesn't overwrite your data if you're mapping volumes or if you restart a container.

These checks are done in bcoin-init.js which is run by the bpanel/bcoin image that is used to create the bcoin container and sets up a node based on the configs described above. Setup scripts are passed the bcoin node object that has been created so the scripts have access to the node being started at run time as well as the relevant configs.

Example setup scripts can be found in the /scripts directory (funded-dummy-wallets.js and setup-coinbase-address.js).