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Chainstack Self-Hosted turns your DigitalOcean droplet into a production-grade platform for deploying and managing blockchain nodes — Ethereum, Solana, Robinhood and other supported networks — in a few clicks. For production node workloads, attach a Block Storage volume using “Manually format and mount” so the appliance can absorb it into its storage pool.

Software Included

Creating an App using the Control Panel

Click the Deploy to DigitalOcean button to create a Droplet based on this 1-Click App. If you aren’t logged in, this link will prompt you to log in with your DigitalOcean account.

Creating an App using the API

In addition to creating a Droplet from the Chainstack Blockchain Management 1-Click App using the control panel, you can also use the DigitalOcean API. As an example, to create a 4GB Chainstack Blockchain Management Droplet in the SFO2 region, you can use the following curl command. You need to either save your API access token to an environment variable or substitute it in the command below.

curl -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
         -H 'Authorization: Bearer '$TOKEN'' -d \
        '{"name":"choose_a_name","region":"sfo2","size":"s-2vcpu-4gb","image":"chainstack-chainstackblockc"}' \
        "https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets"

Getting Started After Deploying Chainstack Blockchain Management

Chainstack Self-Hosted — Getting Started

A control panel for deploying and managing blockchain nodes — running on your DigitalOcean droplet.

1. Wait for first-boot

The droplet boots and runs an automated configuration process. This takes ~8–10 minutes after the droplet shows “Active” in the DO control panel. You can monitor progress over SSH:

ssh root@your_droplet_public_ipv4
cloud-init status --wait        # blocks until done; tail -f /var/log/cloud-init-output.log in another shell to watch

When cloud-init status reports status: done, the appliance is ready.

2. Retrieve your credentials

Credentials are auto-generated per droplet — they are not shared with any other deployment. On your first interactive SSH login, the full welcome banner is dumped to the terminal. After that, the short MOTD banner points at the file:

cat /root/CHAINSTACK_README.txt

The file contains:

• The Control Panel URL (http://your_droplet_public_ipv4) and admin username/password
• Grafana URL (http://your_droplet_public_ipv4/grafana) and Grafana admin password
• Pointers to the cp-suite values file (PostgreSQL passwords, RSA keys, etc.)

3. Sign in to the Control Panel

Open in your browser:

http://your_droplet_public_ipv4

• Username: admin
• Password: see /root/CHAINSTACK_README.txt

4. Add storage for blockchain node workloads

The appliance carves a native LVM partition (/dev/vda2) from the droplet’s root disk on first boot. For production blockchain nodes you’ll want significantly more storage than the root disk can provide — attach a DigitalOcean Block Storage volume sized for your network’s chain data.

Important: when you attach the volume (during droplet creation or afterwards), the DO volume wizard offers two options:

• ❌ Automatically format and mount (default) — the volume is formatted ext4 and mounted at /mnt/volume_*. The Chainstack bootstrap will skip it (it won’t claim a filesystem you might be using), and the volume sits idle.
• ✅ Manually format and mount — the volume is left raw and unmounted. The Chainstack bootstrap discovers it and adds it to the topolvm-vg volume group automatically.

If you attached a volume during droplet creation with “Manually format and mount” selected, it’s already in the pool — no action needed. Verify with:

vgs topolvm-vg                  # PV count should be 2
pvs                             # /dev/vda2 + /dev/sda (or similar)

Adding storage to a running droplet

If you attach a volume after the appliance is already running:

# 1. Identify the new device
lsblk

# 2. Add it to the volume group
pvcreate /dev/sda
vgextend topolvm-vg /dev/sda

# 3. Verify
vgs topolvm-vg

If you mistakenly used “Automatically format and mount”, you can still recover:

# 1. Unmount and remove from /etc/fstab
umount /mnt/volume_<name>
sed -i '/volume_<name>/d' /etc/fstab

# 2. Wipe the ext4 signature
wipefs -a /dev/sda

# 3. Absorb into the VG
pvcreate /dev/sda
vgextend topolvm-vg /dev/sda

5. Operate

The bundled cpctl CLI handles lifecycle operations:

cpctl status             # check installation health
cpctl upgrade            # upgrade to the latest cp-suite version
cpctl uninstall          # tear everything down (use --help for flags)

More

• Documentation: https://docs.chainstack.com/docs/self-hosted/introduction
• Support: https://chainstack.com/contact/