Not sure what Kovan is all about? Read the proposal!

Connecting to the Kovan Testnet

Kovoan requires the use of Parity's PoA Protocol. Ensure Parity 1.5.4 or greater is installed. For Parity support, head to the Parity gitter channel.

After configuring, you probably want to acquire some Kovan Ether. To do so, follow the faucet guide.

⚠️ If you're deploying with truffle, set the gas for the network to something less than Kovan's block limit of 4700000.

Non-Authorities (Regular Users)

Most users who want to interact with the Kovan chain simply need to run parity with the correct chain config:

OSX / Linux

Parity 1.5.5 or greater, use parity --chain=kovan
For Parity 1.5.4, use parity --chain=kovan-config.json

kovan-config.json in this repo.

Windows

A set up guide video for windows has also been created: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTjstkfOT8E

Authorities (Block Validators)

Additionally, authorities need to have their keystores and decryption keys set up:

~/.local/share/io.parity.ethereum/keys/kovan/[keystore file].json
~/[file containing keystore password]

Then start parity with the following command:

parity --chain=kovan-config.json --force-sealing --engine-signer=[authority address] --password=[file containing keystore password]

Netstats

For Authorities, It's advised to set up netstats, so your node status is visible on http://kovan-stats.parity.io/.

git clone https://github.com/cubedro/eth-net-intelligence-api;
cd eth-net-intelligence-api;
npm install;
npm install -g pm2;

Edit the config file eth-net-intelligence-api/app.json:

[
  {
    "name"              : "kovan-netstats",
    "script"            : "app.js",
    "log_date_format"   : "YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm Z",
    "merge_logs"        : false,
    "watch"             : false,
    "max_restarts"      : 10,
    "exec_interpreter"  : "node",
    "exec_mode"         : "fork_mode",
    "env":
    {
      "NODE_ENV"        : "production",
      "INSTANCE_NAME"   : "[company name] Kovan Authority Node #0",
      "CONTACT_DETAILS" : "[admin email]",
      "WS_SERVER"       : "wss://kovan-stats.parity.io",
      "WS_SECRET"       : "[ask in the gitter channel]",
      "VERBOSITY"       : 2
    }
  }
]

Then start netstats:

pm2 start app.json