Polkadot’s launch is approaching fast. Proof-of-Concept 3 went live earlier this year, powering the new “Alexander” testnet. Mainnet launch is scheduled for Q4 2019, bridging Substrate, Ethereum and other parachains.

Whether you’re a developer or prospective buidler, the first thing anyone interested in Polkadot should do is setup a node and join the network.

TL;DR

We’ll use Docker and Polkadot’s latest Docker pre-built image (0.3.14) to spin up and sync a node in under 5 minutes. If you’ve never used Docker or don’t know what an image is, don’t worry, this article will guide you through the whole process.

Although Parity has done a great job documenting the steps, building Polkadot won’t be easy unless you’re a Rust developer. The reality is that compiling the software can be alot easier.

Let’s get started!

Install Docker

Docker is a tool that helps you build, test and deploy applications by using containers. Containers are essentially virtual machines (with their own memory, processing power and storage). Containers also hold libraries, tools and other dependencies necessary to run your app.

You can install Docker for desktop here.

Initialize Docker

Once installed, you can open Docker from your applications folder. Docker will then start and run from your Desktop. This will create a new container where we can setup our Polkadot node.

For the purpose of this tutorial we will use the following directory, where folder is your working destination for this project:

/my/local/folder

If you’re using a local Polkadot binary, you may want to use the following folders:

OS-X: ~/Library/Application Support/Polkadot/