Run a station

This page gets a station from nothing to serving phones. It follows the operator runbook in the station repo, which has more detail on every step.

1. Build the software

Install the Rust toolchain from rustup.rs, then:

git clone https://github.com/railroad-network/station.git
cd station
cargo build --release -p rrn-station -p rrn-cli

This produces two programs in target/release/:

• station, the daemon. Holds the wallet and ledger, talks to phones. This is the thing that runs forever.
• rrn, the command-line client. Your admin tool. It talks to the running daemon over a local socket and only works while the daemon is up.

Put both on your PATH, for example with sudo cp target/release/{station,rrn} /usr/local/bin/.

2. Initialize

station init

You are prompted twice for a wallet passphrase. Choose it carefully. It protects the station’s identity key and encrypts every backup, and you type it each time the station starts.

Write the passphrase down, on paper, in two places. A passphrase that exists only in one person’s head has already been lost twice in this project’s own history. Key recovery builds a net for a lost passphrase, but only if you set it up first.

init creates the data directory, ~/.railroad/station by default, and prints the station’s rrn1… address. That address is the station’s identity.

3. Configure

config.toml in the data directory. The defaults suit a single-community pilot. The section you may want to touch is [mobile]:

[network]
listen = "127.0.0.1:7400"    # station-to-station port: loopback-only is correct today
role = "writer"              # this station owns the community's log (the default)

[mobile]
listen = "0.0.0.0:7500"      # where phones connect; 7500 is what the app expects
advertise = true             # announce the station on the LAN so phones find it by name
# name = "Railroad Station — Maple Street"   # optional friendly name shown on phones

Two practical notes:

• Firewall. Allow inbound TCP 7500 from your LAN. Port 7400 should stay unreachable from other machines.
• Advertising. advertise = true makes the station appear in the app’s “Join your community” list. If your network blocks mDNS, members type the station’s address and port by hand instead.

Your station is a writer: it owns the log and there is exactly one per community. A writer has no peers. You can optionally run a second station as a read-only replica for off-site audit; it can never write, so it can never fork the community. The runbook covers it.

4. Run

station run

It prompts for the passphrase and serves until stopped. Check it is alive from the same machine:

rrn whoami        # the station's rrn1… address
rrn history       # the ledger log, empty at first

Surviving reboots

station run also reads the passphrase from the RRN_PASSPHRASE environment variable. Never write the passphrase on a command line or in a script; it lands in shell history. On Linux, a minimal systemd unit reads it from a root-only file:

# /etc/systemd/system/rrn-station.service
[Unit]
Description=Railroad Network station
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
User=railroad
EnvironmentFile=/etc/railroad/station.env   # RRN_PASSPHRASE=…; chmod 600, owned by root
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/station run
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

sudo systemctl enable --now rrn-station

Keeping the passphrase on disk readable only by root is an accepted pilot-grade trade so the station comes back by itself after a power cut. If your community does not accept it, start the station by hand after each reboot.

On macOS, fetch it from the keychain at the moment of use:

security add-generic-password -a "$USER" -s rrn-station-passphrase -w   # once
RRN_PASSPHRASE=$(security find-generic-password -s rrn-station-passphrase -w) station run

Next

Pair phones and wallets, then found the community with your organizers, then, the same day, Backups and key recovery.