Ceres is a combine harvester designed to harvest plots for Chia blockchain and multi chia forks(like flax, spare....) simultaneously by running single harvester on your machine.

Ceres runs a single harvester to communicate with multiple locale or remote Chia Farmer, Flax Farmer, Spare Famer....., shown in the figure:

• single harvester, multiple chia forks harvested

• ceres harvester will not conflict with Chia harvester or any fork's havesters

• both chia og plots and pool plots are supported

• based on Chia's source code, with least modification

• only one harvester is run, not each harvester for each fork

• same memory and cpu usage as a single Chia harvester

• follow Chia's asyncio design pattern, by principle multiple forks activities will not affect Chia harvestering

• easy to configure to support more forks as you wish

• multi-platforms supported, such as Raspberry Pi

Currently, almost all forks have update their farmer version to Chia farmer version after 1.2.

So Ceres currently only support communication with farmers after Chia farmer 1.2

Note

If you wanna reinstall Ceres or if you have installed old version Ceres before,

you should first delete .ceres directory under your user home directory before Ceres initialization.

rm -rf ~/.ceres

Ceres can be installed the same way installing Chia normally.

It's highly recommended to read through Chia's wiki, easpecially this article , Farming on many machines · Chia-Network/chia-blockchain Wiki · GitHub before using Ceres.

We start to initialize Ceres

1. Download Code

git clone https://github.com/hulatang/ceres-combineharvester.git

2. Installation

   cd ceres-combineharvester
   sudo chmod +x install.sh
   ./install.sh
   

3. Activate virtual environment

   . ./activate
   

Read this section carefully

Totally initialization has three steps, read instruction detail below

# first, initialize directory structure for ceres
1. ceres init

# second, after you have configure farmer info, initialize 
# directories for every coins
2. ceres init --coins

# third, copy farmer ca directories to specific directory under .ceres
# and generate ssl files for every coin
3. ceres generate_ssl

We start to initialize Ceres by steps in detail:

(venv) ➜ stands for ceres virtual environment

~ stands for user home directory

1. Initialize ceres directory structure

   (venv) ➜ ceres init
   

 after complete this step, there will be a .ceres under your /home/username/ directory,

.ceres directory looks like this:

(venv) ➜ tree ~/.ceres -L 4
.ceres
└── mainnet
   └── config
       ├── coins_config.yaml
       ├── config.yaml
       └── ssl
           ├── ca
           ├── daemon
           ├── farmer
           ├── full_node
           ├── harvester
           ├── introducer
           ├── timelord
           └── wallet

2. Setup farmer peers info

   ~/.ceres/mainnet/config/coins_config.yaml is an importatnt configure file in which your farmer info is configured.

   by default top lines of coins_config.yaml looks like this

   farmer_machine:
       - farmer_peer: 
           address: localhost
           coins:
             #- chia
             #- flax
   

now let's assume you have two farmer machines, and you are going to farm chia, flax, spare and kale

A: 192.168.1.100: chia, flax

B: 192.168.1.299: spare, kale

open ~/.ceres/mainnet/config/coins_config.yaml and enter your farmer info like below:

NOTE the indent and "-" symbol

farmer_machine:

- farmer_peer: 
  address: 192.168.1.100
  coins:
    - chia
    - flax

- farmer_peer
  address: 192.168.1.200
  coins:
    - spare
    - kale

Then run command:

(venv) ➜ ceres init --coins

After this step finished, ceres will make default root directories for every coin under .ceres

Now .ceres directory looks like this:

(venv) ➜ tree ~/.ceres/mainnet -a -L 3
.ceres/mainnet
├── all_ca
│   ├── chia_ca
│   ├── flax_ca
│   ├── kale_ca
│   └── spare_ca
├── all_coins
│   ├── .chia
│   │   └── mainnet
│   ├── .flax
│   │   └── mainnet
│   ├── .kale
│   │   └── mainnet
│   └── .spare
│   └── mainnet
└── config
 ├── coins_config.yaml
 ├── config.yaml
 └── ssl
 ├── ca
 ├── daemon
 ├── farmer
 ├── full_node
 ├── harvester
 ├── introducer
 ├── timelord
 └── wallet

3. Copy your farmer ca directory of every coin into ceres

   Take Chia for example, copy ca directory of your Chia farmer machine into .ceres/mainnet/all_ca/chia_ca

   scp -r [email protected]:~/.chia/mainnet/config/ssl/ca ~/.ceres/mainnet/all_ca/chia_ca
   

repeat above step, copy ca directory of every coin on your farmer machin into .ceres/mainnet/all_ca/[coin_name_]_ca directory

after above step finnished, .ceres/mainnet/all_ca looks like this:

.ceres/mainnet
├── all_ca
│   ├── chia_ca
│   │   └── ca
│   ├── flax_ca
│   │   └── ca
│   ├── kale_ca
│   │   └── ca
│   └── spare_ca
│       └── ca

4. Generate ssl files

   (venv) ➜ ceres generate_ssl
   

After above steps completed, Ceres is successfully initialized.

Before start ceres, you can configure log level as you wish.

By default, Ceres set log level the same as Chia: "Warning"

If you wanna to set log level of Ceres to "DEBUG",

open ~/.ceres/mainnet/config/config.yaml

set the log level:

log_level: "DEBUG"

open file ~/.ceres/mainnet/config/coins_config.yaml

by default it looks like this:

#path of your plot files
plot_directories: []

you should set plot_directories like this, NOTE the indent and "-" symbol

plot_directories:

- /home/your/plot/path/0001

- /home/your/plot/path/0002

- /home/your/plot/path/0003

activate venv first, then run:

(venv) ➜ ceres start harvester -r

you can use this command to see if Ceres works correctly:

tail -f ~/.ceres/mainnet/log/debug.log | grep ceres.harvester

you should see some info like this:

harvester ceres.harvester.harvester: INFO     (flax)     : 0 plots were eligible for farming 5c63a7238a... Found 0 proofs. Time: 0.00012 s. Total 20 plots
harvester ceres.harvester.harvester: INFO     (chia)     : 0 plots were eligible for farming 1734aefc18... Found 0 proofs. Time: 0.00012 s. Total 20 plots
harvester ceres.harvester.harvester: INFO     (flax)     : 2 plots were eligible for farming 5c63a7238a... Found 0 proofs. Time: 0.00012 s. Total 20 plots
harvester ceres.harvester.harvester: INFO     (chia)     : 1 plots were eligible for farming 1734aefc18... Found 0 proofs. Time: 0.00012 s. Total 20 plots
harvester ceres.harvester.harvester: INFO     (spare)    : 0 plots were eligible for farming 5c63a7238a... Found 0 proofs. Time: 0.00011 s. Total 20 plots
harvester ceres.harvester.harvester: INFO     (kale)     : 1 plots were eligible for farming 1734aefc18... Found 0 proofs. Time: 0.00009 s. Total 20 plots

Nothing wrong if you see some info says like: No keys on this machine

Running harvester does not require any keys.

ceres stop all -d

Please DO use names in coins_config.yaml

vim ~/.ceres/mainnet/config/coins_config.yaml

You can only use names under coin_names:

coin_names:
  - chia
  - flax
  - spare
  - silicoin
  - flora 
  - socks 
  - apple 
  - kale 
  - greendoge 
  - tad 
  - dogechia
  - maize 
  - wheat
  - taco
  - covid
  - melati
  - cactus
  - hddcoin
  - avocado
  - sector
  - nchain
  - btcgreen
  - cannabis
  - scam
  - fork
  - olive
  - pipscoin
  - beer
  - cunt
  - littlelambocoin
  - stor
  - beet
  - lotus
  - mint
  - kiwi
  - mogua
  - tranzact
  - peas
  - salvia
  - staicoin
  - taco
  - melati
  - cryptodoge
  - venidium
  - goldcoin
  - skynet (see Changelog for details)

Let's say you wanna add silicoin to farmer 192.168.1.100

First stop ceres

(venv) ➜ ceres stop all -d

open ~/.ceres/mainnet/config/coins_config.yaml

1. add silicoin to farmer_peer:

 farmer_machine:
     - farmer_peer: 
         address: 192.168.1.100
         coins:
           - chia
           - flax
           - silicoin  <--- add silicoin here

2. Then:

(venv) ➜ ceres init --coins

next copy silicoin farmer's ca directory to ~/.ceres/mainnet/all_ca/silicoin_ca

3. next generate ssl files

(venv) ➜ ceres generate_ssl

4. restart ceres:

(venv) ➜ ceres restart harvester -r

Once you set up one harvester machine

you can copy ceres all_ca directory under ~/.ceres/mainnet and coins_config.yaml under ~/.ceres/mainnet/config to another harvester machine

Then on the other machine:

(venv) ➜ ceres init
(venv) ➜ ceres init --coins
(venv) ➜ ceres generate_sll
(venv) ➜ ceres start harvester -r

Chia, Flax, Spare, Silicoin, Flora, Kale, Goji,, Seno, Apple

Greendoge, Tad, Dogechia, Maize, Wheat, Taco, Covid, Melati, Cactus,

Hddcoin, Avocado, Sector, Nchain, Btcgreen, Cannabis, Scam, Fork

Defult Chia Harvester and Famer is structured as below

By Chia default, you should run one harvester for each fork's farmer.

Ceres has a different structure, like below:

By using Ceres, you can run an unique Harvester server which will response to all the farmer's request. Thanks to Chia's asyncio pattern, a single Harvester server has enough throughput to proccess farmer's asynchronous challenge hash request.

besure you are under ceres-combineharvester directory

# update ceres
git pull origin main
(venv) ➜ ceres update

# do steps in Add Coin Steps 

# restart ceres
(venv) ➜ ceres stop all -d
(venv) ➜ ceres start harvester -r

NOTE: after pulling code from github, don't forget to run ceres update to complete ceres updating.

Downloadd ceres.zip under Releases, unzip it

Just run ceres.exe under cmd/powershell/windows terminal

run ceres.exe the same way as linux instructions above.

2021-10-30

• fix a bug when lots of forks are harvestered, which will affetct the minning efficiency

• skynet mainnet supported (skynet farmer code modification required， see detail below)

2021-10-21

• Windows 0.0.2 released

• Add coin supported: skynet

Note:

Skynet add redundant params into the message sent from Farmer to Harvester, which is meaningless, you should comment two lines of skynet farmer code to be harvestered by Ceres.

I will send a pull request to skynet.

Here is the codes:

skynet-blockchain/blob/main/skynet/farmer/farmer_api.py

Around line 438, comment this line:

new_signage_point.timelord_reward_puzzle_hash

message = harvester_protocol.NewSignagePointHarvester(
            new_signage_point.challenge_hash,
            new_signage_point.difficulty,
            new_signage_point.sub_slot_iters,
            new_signage_point.signage_point_index,
            new_signage_point.challenge_chain_sp,
         #   new_signage_point.timelord_reward_puzzle_hash,
            pool_difficulties,
        )

skynet-blockchain/blob/main/skynet/protocols/harvester_protocol.py

arround line 40: comment this line

timelord_reward_puzzle_hash: bytes32

2021-10-19

Windows 0.0.1 beta released

update venidium configuration

2021-10-18 Add more supported coins:

• venidium
• goldcoin
• aedgecoin

2021-10-13

Add more supported coins:

• olive
• pipscoin
• beer
• cunt
• littlelambocoin
• stor
• beet
• lotus
• mint
• kiwi
• mogua
• tranzact
• peas
• salvia
• staicoin
• taco
• melati
• cryptodoge