Upgrading Monero Command Line Interface

Sep 19, 2017
Cryptocurrency, Monero
David Egan

Notes on upgrading Monero command line interface on Ubuntu 16.04 From Wolfram-Warptangent to Helium-Hydra.

Download New Binaries

Download the binaries, along with the list of hashes that will allow you to verify the download:

# Make a suitable directory and move into it
mkdir ~/monero/helium-hydra && cd $_

# Download the Monero Linux 64 bit CLI client
wget https://downloads.getmonero.org/cli/monero-linux-x64-v0.11.0.0.tar.bz2

# Download the GPG-signed canonical list of hashes
wget https://getmonero.org/downloads/hashes.txt

Verify the Download

To verify the download, you need to:

Verify that you have a true copy of hashes.txt
Check that the sha256sum checksum for your downloaded tar file matches the quoted value in hashes.txt

To verify hashes.txt, you must install the appropriate GPG key, which is found here in the Monero source code repository (/utils/gpg_keys).

The hashes.txt file will state which signature has been used - in this case, we need to add the GPG signature for fluffypony to GPG.

# Download the raw public key:
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/monero-project/monero/master/utils/gpg_keys/fluffypony.asc

# Import this public key to GnuPG:
gpg --import fluffypony.asc

You can now use GnuPG to verify hashes.txt. From within the same directory as the file, run:

gpg --verify hashes.txt

If the hashes.txt file is genuine, you should see:

# email has been obfuscated - you should see the correct email in your output
gpg: Signature made Tue 12 Sep 2017 21:37:04 IST using RSA key ID 1CCD4FCD
gpg: Good signature from "Riccardo Spagni <***@******.net>"
gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg:          There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.
Primary key fingerprint: BDA6 BD70 42B7 21C4 67A9  759D 7455 C5E3 C0CD CEB9
     Subkey fingerprint: 94B7 38DD 3501 32F5 ACBE  EA1D 5543 2DF3 1CCD 4FCD

You can now use hashes.txt to verify the Monero download:

sha256sum -c hashes.txt 2>&1 | grep OK

# Successful verification will look like this:
monero-linux-x64-v0.11.0.0.tar.bz2: OK

Extract

Extract the files from the downloaded tarball:

cd ~/monero/helium-hydra
tar -xjvf monero-linux-x64-v0.11.0.0.tar.bz2

Move/copy Wallet files from old to new directory:

# Replace 'MyWallet' with your wallet name - note lack of spaces after commas
cp ~/monero/wolfram-warptangent/monero-v0.10.3.1/{MyWallet,MyWallet.address.txt,MyWallet.keys} ~/monero/helium-hydra/monero-v0.11.0

Run Monero

When you move into the new Monero directory and run ./monerod, it should start syncing to the forked blockchain - it will not need to download the Monero blockchain from scratch.

In my case, I had already synced after the hard-fork with the previous CLI client, and this caused a problem. To get around this, remove some downloaded blocks by running monero-blockchain-import:

# Get rid of the most recent 1000 blocks - it may be necessary to remove more
./monero-blockchain-import --pop-blocks 1000

Connect Up and Run Monero

A convenient way to manage Monero version upgrades is to create symlinks to Monero executables within a directory that is in your $PATH.

For example, after you download and verify the ‘helium-hydra’ Monero binaries, you might symlink to relevant files from within your /usr/local/bin directory:

sudo ln -s ~/monero/helium-hydra/monero-v0.11.0.0/monerod monerod
sudo ln -s ~/monero/helium-hydra/monero-v0.11.0.0/monero-wallet-cli monero-wallet-cli

The /usr/local/bin directory now contains the following:

lrwxrwxrwx  1 root  root       56 Sep 19 10:35 monerod -> /home/david/monero/helium-hydra/monero-v0.11.0.0/monerod*
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root  root       66 Sep 19 10:36 monero-wallet-cli -> /home/david/monero/helium-hydra/monero-v0.11.0.0/monero-wallet-cli*

To run monerod from the helium-hydra package, just run monerod in your terminal. Likewise, monero-wallet-cli will run the correct wallet CLI binary.

Dev Notes

Software Development Resources by David Egan.