exccd Setup Guide

This guide is intended to help you setup the exccd application using startup flags.

Prerequisites:

Use the latest exccinstall to install exccd. Additional steps will be required if another installation method was used.
Review how the launch commands for the Command Prompt (Windows) and Bash (macOS/Linux) shells differ here.

exccd is the ExchangeCoin node daemon, which works in the background and maintains the complete transaction history of ExchangeCoin blockchain. It facilitates transaction relaying to other nodes on the network. Essentially, it is your own personal ExchangeCoin blockchain server. The complete blockchain data is stored in the data folder within the exccd's home directory.

Advanced Users: If you are running in headless mode via SSH, you will need to use a terminal multiplexer such as screen or tmux. Where you see the instruction to move to another shell, you’ll need to start a new window in screen or tmux.

Connect to the ExchangeCoin Network

When launching exccd for the first time, it will start downloading the blockchain and connect to the ExchangeCoin network. In order for exccwallet and exccctl to communicate with exccd, the configuration files must have rpcuser and rpcpass settings enabled. These settings allow for authentication when exccwallet and exccctl connect to exccd.

Configure RPC Username and Password

If you used exccinstall, your configuration files are already setup with the RPC username/password for exccd, exccwallet, and exccctl.

If you did not use exccinstall, you will need to enable the bare minimum settings in your configuration files. Follow this guide to do so.
Start exccd

Assuming that you have set up your configuration files correctly, open another shell window within your ExchangeCoin directory, or use the last window if you have just created your wallet. To run ExchangeCoin CLI applications, enter the appropriate command based on your OS/Shell application. Refer to the prerequisites section of this guide for the correct command.
```
exccd
```
Wait for exccd to Sync to the ExchangeCoin Blockchain

After launching exccd successfully, you will notice messages appearing in your shell window as the daemon connects to the network and starts processing blocks. It is important to wait until this process is completed, as the entire blockchain is being downloaded into the exccd data directory.

You will see a line at the start like this:
```
22:58:04 2016-02-09 [INF] BMGR: Syncing to block height 617 from peer 104.236.167.133:9666
```
Then, as it continues to download blocks, you will see lines like this:
```
22:58:16 2016-02-09 [INF] BMGR: Processed 321 blocks in the last 10.03s (544 transactions, height 322, 2016-02-09 09:50:34 +1000 EST)
```
After exccd has finished syncing, the output will show a message stating the current block height. You can also confirm that the blockchain is fully synced by comparing the block height shown in exccctl getinfo or exccwallet getinfo output against the current block height on the the official block explorer. If the heights match, then the blockchain is fully synced.

The ExchangeCoin blockchain is considered to be fully synced when the most recent block has been processed and its height matches the current block height. You can verify this by either comparing the date and time in the log message or checking the height of the last processed block against the last block height on the explorer.

Note that this connection will be used in the future. You must leave this exccd instance running in order to use exccwallet.

Now that you’ve set up exccd, visit the exccwallet Setup guide.