PFN Requirements

To ensure that your public fullnode (PFN) operates smoothly, it should meet the requirements specified in this document.

For running a production-grade PFN, we recommend that your hardware meet the same requirements as a validator or VFN. You can see the hardware requirements for these, here: validator and VFN hardware requirements.

When you are running a PFN, you are required to open network ports on your nodes to allow other nodes (i.e., peers) to connect to you. There are different Aptos network types, and each network type uses a different port. However, the only network type that a PFN uses is the public network, where PFNs to connect to other PFNs and VFNs.

Your PFN can be configured so that the public network operates using a specific port on your node. You can configure the port settings using the node configuration YAML file. Here is an example configuration file for a PFN that configures the public network to use port 6180.

The recommendations described below assume the default port settings used by PFNs. If you have changed the default port settings in your configuration file, then you should adjust the recommendations accordingly.

Assuming default ports are used, the following should be configured for PFNs:

• Open the following TCP ports:
  • 6182 – Public network: Open this port publicly to enable other PFNs to connect to your PFN.
• Close the following TCP ports:
  • 9101 – Inspection service: Close this port to prevent unauthorized metric inspection.
  • 9102 – Admin service: Close this port to prevent unauthorized admin service interaction.
  • 80/8080 - REST API: Close this port to prevent unauthorized REST API access.

The amount of data stored by Aptos PFNs depends on the ledger history (length) of the blockchain and the number of on-chain states (e.g., accounts and resources). Both the ledger history and the number of on-chain states depend on several additional factors, including the age of the blockchain, the average transaction rate over time, and the configuration of the ledger database pruner. At the time of writing, we estimate that testnet and mainnet PFNs require several 100’s of GB of storage.

Note that because archival nodes store the entire history of the blockchain, the database size on archival nodes will continue to grow unbounded. As a result, we cannot provide a recommendation for archival node storage sizes.