Bor Overview

Bor is the official Golang implementation of the Polygon PoS blockchain. It is a fork of geth and is EVM compatible (upto London fork).

Installing bor using packaging

The easiest way to get started with bor is to install the packages using the command below. Please take a look at the releases section to find the latest stable version of bor.

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/0xPolygon/install/main/bor.sh | bash -s -- v2.0.0 <network> <node_type>

The network accepts mainnet, or amoy and the node type accepts validator or sentry or archive. The installation script does the following things:

• Create a new user named bor.
• Install the bor binary at /usr/bin/bor.
• Dump the suitable config file (based on the network and node type provided) at /var/lib/bor and use it as the home dir.
• Create a systemd service named bor at /lib/systemd/system/bor.service which starts bor using the config file as bor user.

The releases supports both the networks i.e. Polygon Mainnet, and Amoy (Testnet) unless explicitly specified. Before the stable release for mainnet, pre-releases will be available marked with beta tag for deploying on Amoy (testnet). On sufficient testing, stable release for mainnet will be announced with a forum post.

Building from source

• Install Go (version 1.19 or later) and a C compiler.
• Clone the repository and build the binary using the following commands:

  make bor
  

• Start bor using the ideal config files for the validator and sentry provided in the packaging folder.

  ./build/bin/bor server --config ./packaging/templates/mainnet-v1/sentry/sentry/bor/config.toml
  

• To build full set of utilities, run:

  make all
  

• Run unit and integration tests

  make test && make test-integration
  

Using the new cli

Post v0.3.0 release, bor uses a new command line interface (cli). The new-cli (located at internal/cli) has been built while keeping the flag usage similar to old-cli (located at cmd/geth) with a few notable changes. Please refer to docs section for the flag usage guide and example.

Parity / OpenEthereum Trace API (trace_*)

Bor includes a Parity-compatible trace namespace (trace_block, trace_transaction, trace_replayTransaction, trace_replayBlockTransactions, trace_call, trace_callMany). These methods are disabled by default because they are expensive and require an archive node.

Enable with the --rpc.enabletrace flag (or enabletrace = true under [jsonrpc] in TOML):

bor server --config ./config.toml --rpc.enabletrace

Or in config.toml:

[jsonrpc]
  enabletrace = true

Requirements:

• Archive node (--gcmode archive)

• Sufficient HTTP write timeout for deep blocks if needed — the trace methods themselves already use a 60s per-phase budget, while the HTTP response write timeout defaults to 30s. It is configurable via TOML only:

  [jsonrpc.timeouts]
    write = "60s"
  

Known limitations vs Polygon Erigon:

• trace_call/trace_callMany still require the simulated sender to pass Bor's upfront gas balance check; once funded, gas debit/refund is suppressed.
• trace_block omits the state-sync pseudo-transaction for pre-Madhugiri blocks (< 80,084,800 on mainnet); post-Madhugiri blocks are fully supported.
• vmTrace for a post-Madhugiri state-sync transaction reports an empty ops list (state-sync events execute outside the regular EVM opcode flow).

Latest Config Reference

For the latest canonical TOML config options, refer to:

• docs/cli/default_config.toml

Documentation

• The official documentation for the Polygon PoS chain can be found here. It contains all the conceptual and architectural details of the chain along with an operational guide for users running the nodes.
• New release announcements and discussions can be found on our forum page.
• Polygon improvement proposals can be found here

Contribution guidelines

Thank you for considering helping out with the source code! We welcome contributions from anyone on the internet, and are grateful for even the smallest of fixes! If you'd like to contribute to bor, please fork, fix, commit, and send a pull request for the maintainers to review and merge into the main code base.

From the outset, we defined some guidelines to ensure new contributions only ever enhance the project:

• Quality: Code in the Polygon project should meet the style guidelines, with sufficient test-cases, descriptive commit messages, evidence that the contribution does not break any compatibility commitments or cause adverse feature interactions, and evidence of high-quality peer-review. Code must adhere to the official Go formatting guidelines (i.e. uses gofmt).
• Testing: Please ensure that the updated code passes all the tests locally before submitting a pull request. In order to run unit tests, run make test and to run integration tests, run make test-integration.
• Size: The Polygon project’s culture is one of small pull-requests, regularly submitted. The larger a pull-request, the more likely it is that you will be asked to resubmit as a series of self-contained and individually reviewable smaller PRs.
• Maintainability: If the feature will require ongoing maintenance (e.g. support for a particular brand of database), we may ask you to accept responsibility for maintaining this feature
• Pull requests need to be based on and opened against the develop branch.
• PR title should be prefixed with package(s) they modify.
  • E.g. "eth, rpc: make trace configs optional"

Hardware Requirements

Minimum:

• CPU with 4+ cores
• 8GB RAM
• 1TB free storage space to sync the Mainnet
• 8 MBit/sec download Internet service

Recommended:

• Fast CPU with 8+ cores
• 16GB+ RAM
• High-performance SSD with at least 1TB of free space
• 25+ MBit/sec download Internet service

License

The Bor library (i.e. all code outside of the cmd directory) is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0, also included in our repository in the COPYING.LESSER file.

The Bor binaries (i.e. all code inside of the cmd directory) are licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0, also included in our repository in the COPYING file.

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