Litecoin was launched by Charles Lee in 2011 and it is a top 5 cryptocurrency. It is a P2P crypto and it has gained immense popularity in the recent past. In a similar fashion to BTC, Litecoin is a form of digital money that uses blockchain technology to maintain a public ledger of all transactions. It is an open source software project released under the MIT/X11 license.

Litecoin has gained popularity due to its-

• Increased speed
• Number of coins
• Market cap

In brief, the differences between BTC and LTC is-

Having already published a tutorial on setting up an Ethereum node in your server, in this tutorial we will walk you through setting up a Litecoin node in your CentOS 7 server.

PREREQUISITES

• CentOS 7 server
• Root access

STEPS TO SETUP A FULL LITECOIN NODE IN CENTOS 7

We will install the latest version of Litecoin from the official website. First log into your CentOS 7 server with root access and navigate to home directory using the command – cd ~ or any download directory.  Use wget to download Litecoin using the command- wget https://download.litecoin.org/litecoin-0.14.2/linux/litecoin-0.14.2-x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.gz

Once the download is complete, you will be able to see a console message as shown below-

You can verify that the download has been successful by using the command- ls -ltr : 

Once downloaded, you can extract the directory using the command- tar -zxvf litecoin-0.14.2-x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.gz

Now we are ready to install all needed packages. To install use the command- sudo install -m 0755 -o root -g root -t /usr/local/bin ~/litecoin-0.14.2/bin/*

This completes our initial installation. Once installed you will be able to use commands – litecoind and litecoin-cli from anywhere in your command prompt. To verify you can try using the litecoin -cli command on the console as shown below-

We now need to configure the LTC node. First, create a folder using the command- mkdir .litecoin

Please note this is a hidden folder and will not be visible if you use the command ls-ltr. Instead, to verify, you can use ls-ltra. This will list your folder on the screen:

Navigate to the newly created folder using the command- cd .litecoin/ as shown below-

Create a new config file with vim using the command- vi litecoin.conf

Add the following entries (but make sure to modify the password) to the config file:

rpcuser=litecoinrpc
rpcpassword=Test123
txindex=1
server=1
daemon=1
rpcbind=127.0.0.1
bind=127.0.0.1

A snapshot of the file is shown below-

Make sure you’ve changed the rpcuser and rpcpassword values and save the file. With this, we complete our litecoin configuration.

To start your new Litecoin node use the command- litecoind. To verify that it is downloading blocks, use the command- litecoin-cli getinfo.

That’s it!! Assuming you followed the steps outlined above, you now have a full Litecoin node running on your CentOS 7 server.