Installing a VM

AvalancheGo searches for and registers VM plugins under the plugins directory.

To install the virtual machine onto your node, you need to move the built virtual machine binary under this directory. Virtual machine executable names must be either a full virtual machine ID (encoded in CB58), or a VM alias.

Copy the binary into the plugins directory.

cp -n <path to your binary> $GOPATH/src/github.com/ava-labs/avalanchego/build/plugins/

Node Is Not Running

If your node isn't running yet, you can install all virtual machines under your plugin directory by starting the node.

Node Is Already Running

Load the binary with the loadVMs API.

curl -sX POST --data '{
    "jsonrpc":"2.0",
    "id"     :1,
    "method" :"admin.loadVMs",
    "params" :{}
}' -H 'content-type:application/json;' 127.0.0.1:9650/ext/admin

Confirm the response of loadVMs contains the newly installed virtual machine tGas3T58KzdjcJ32c6GpePhtqo9rrHJ1oR9wFBtCcMgaosthX. You'll see this virtual machine as well as any others that weren't already installed previously in the response.

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "result": {
    "newVMs": {
      "tGas3T58KzdjcJ32c6GpePhtqo9rrHJ1oR9wFBtCcMgaosthX": [
        "timestampvm-rs",
        "timestamp-rs"
      ],
      "spdxUxVJQbX85MGxMHbKw1sHxMnSqJ3QBzDyDYEP3h6TLuxqQ": []
    }
  },
  "id": 1
}

Now, this VM's static API can be accessed at endpoints /ext/vm/timestampvm-rs and /ext/vm/timestamp-rs. For more details about VM configs, see here.

In this tutorial, we used the VM's ID as the executable name to simplify the process. However, AvalancheGo would also accept timestampvm-rs or timestamp-rs since those are registered aliases in previous step.