Not sure what Kovan is all about? Read the proposal!

Connecting to the Kovan Testnet

Kovan requires the use of Parity's PoA Protocol. Ensure Parity 1.5.7 or greater is installed. For Parity support, head to the Parity gitter channel.

After configuring, you probably want to acquire some Kovan Ether. To do so, follow the faucet guide.

⚠️ If you're deploying, ensure the gas provided is something less than Kovan's block limit of 5000000.

Non-Authorities (Regular Users)

Most users who want to interact with the Kovan chain simply need to run parity with the correct chain config:

OSX / Linux

Use parity --chain=kovan

Windows

To run Kovan on windows, edit the Parity startup shortcut and append --chain kovan.

Right click the shortcut -> Properties -> edit the "Target" field to end with parity.exe" --chain kovan.

A set up guide video for windows has also been created: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTjstkfOT8E (You no longer need to mess around with the config.json file; just add --chain kovan)

Authorities (Block Validators)

Additionally, authorities need to have their keystores and decryption keys set up:

• ~/.local/share/io.parity.ethereum/keys/kovan/[keystore file].json
• ~/[file containing keystore password]

Then start parity with the following command:

parity --chain=kovan --force-sealing --engine-signer=[authority address] --password=[file containing keystore password] --auto-update=all --min-gas-price 1000000000 --gas-floor-target 8000000 

You can enable transaction signing via RPC (without unlocking the account) by enabling the personal JSON-RPC api:

--jsonrpc-apis web3,eth,net,parity,traces,rpc,personal

Please also ensure your authority has NTP or Chrony installed to ensure your time is kept in sync. This is very important for the AuRA consensus engine.

Failover

For extra redundancy, you can configure a second box to scan for blocks signed by your authority address, and take over should it appear that the primary instance is down:

https://github.com/paritytech/kovan-failover

Netstats

For Authorities, it's advised to set up netstats, so your node status is visible on http://kovan-stats.parity.io/. For regular users, your node status dans be displayed on https://stats.kovan.network/.

git clone https://github.com/cubedro/eth-net-intelligence-api;
cd eth-net-intelligence-api;
npm install;
npm install -g pm2;

Regular Users

Edit the config file eth-net-intelligence-api/app.json, regular users must set "WS_SERVER": "wss://stats.kovan.network" instead:

[
  {
    "name"              : "kovan-netstats",
    "script"            : "app.js",
    "log_date_format"   : "YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm Z",
    "merge_logs"        : false,
    "watch"             : false,
    "max_restarts"      : 10,
    "exec_interpreter"  : "node",
    "exec_mode"         : "fork_mode",
    "env":
    {
      "NODE_ENV"        : "production",
      "INSTANCE_NAME"   : "[company/person name] Kovan Node",
      "CONTACT_DETAILS" : "[admin email]",
      "WS_SERVER"       : "wss://kovan-stats.parity.io",
      "WS_SECRET"       : "[ask in the gitter channel]",
      "VERBOSITY"       : 2
    }
  }
]

Authorities

[
  {
    "name"              : "kovan-netstats",
    "script"            : "app.js",
    "log_date_format"   : "YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm Z",
    "merge_logs"        : false,
    "watch"             : false,
    "max_restarts"      : 10,
    "exec_interpreter"  : "node",
    "exec_mode"         : "fork_mode",
    "env":
    {
      "NODE_ENV"        : "production",
      "INSTANCE_NAME"   : "[company name] Kovan Authority Node #0",
      "CONTACT_DETAILS" : "[admin email]",
      "WS_SERVER"       : "wss://authorities.kovan.network",
      "WS_SECRET"       : "[ask in the gitter channel]",
      "VERBOSITY"       : 2
    }
  }
]

Then start netstats:

pm2 start app.json
pm2 startup
pm2 save