What is IRI

The IOTA Reference Implementation (IRI) is written in Java and is currently the only core client available. It has all the core functionality implemented necessary for participating as a full node in the network. It exposes an API (with certain restrictions) that makes it possible to access all required functionality to get an overview of the network, and utilizes IRI for making transactions.

The API exposed by IRI is rather limited (See for full documentation of available API calls: https://iota.readme.io/), this is largely for security reasons, making it possible to connect to a remote node with doing all of the necessary key signing and handling locally. As such, in order to fully use IOTA, you need to also use one of the provided libraries

The official repository for IRI is on Github: https://github.com/iotaledger/iri

For testing purposes , we advise exchanges to use the testnet branch: https://github.com/iotaledger/iri/tree/testnet

Install IRI

The instructions for installing IRI can be found here: https://iota.readme.io/docs/install-iri. We will add further steps to validiate the new releases soon. You can install it as follows:

git clone https://github.com/iotaledger/iri
cd iri
mvn clean compile && mvn package

You will then have target folder, in which you will find the jar file to execute. If you want to run the dev, version, simply do git clone https://github.com/iotaledger/iri -b dev

Run IRI

Running IRI requires you to first find neighbors. Because IRI does not utilize any peer discovery mechanism at the time of writing, it relies on mutual tethering between peers. We advise you to engage with one of the core members of IOTA, who will assist you in this process. We advise you to utilize TCP for connections with your neighbors. But you can also use UDP.

Once you have found neighbors, you can start IRI. Refer to the Readme to get all potential startup flags.