Upgrading your Besu node

To upgrade your Besu node when using the distribution provided with ConsenSys Quorum Support:

1. Obtain the binary distribution for the updated version. Contact us if you need more information.

2. Stop Besu.

3. Unpack the downloaded files and replace the existing Besu installation. To ensure the previous installation is replaced, options are:

   • Put the Besu distribution in a new directory and sym link a current directory to the new directory.
   • Delete the existing installation before replacing with the Besu distribution.
   caution

   If deleting the existing installation, ensure you delete only the installation files not the data directory or node keys.

4. Start Besu.

important

We recommend storing your .toml configuration file under version control.

Finding peers on restarting

Nodes store known peers in the peer table. The peer table is not persisted to disk. When a node restarts, the node connects to the specified bootnodes and discovers other nodes through the peer discovery process. The node continues collecting data from where it left off before the restart (assuming there was no data corruption in a failure scenario).

Before the node restarted, connected peers saved the node details in their peer tables. These peers can reconnect to the restarted node. The restarted node uses these peers and the bootnodes to discover more peers. To ensure that the restarted node successfully rejoins the network, ensure you specify at least one operational bootnode.