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Shutting Down a Node

Depending on the role (e.g. validator), a node may periodically register itself to the consensus registry, committing itself to serve requests until the expiration epoch. Due to this availability commitment, nodes must be shutdown gracefully to avoid network disruption.

To have the node gracefully shutdown:

  1. Ensure your service manager (e.g. systemd) will not restart the node after exit. Otherwise the node may re-register on startup and you will need to wait again.
  2. Run one of the commands below:
# Issue a graceful shutdown request.
oasis-node control shutdown

# Issue a graceful shutdown request, and block until the node terminates.
# Note: This can take up to 3 full epochs to complete, because the node
# registers each epoch for the next 2 epochs (inclusive).
oasis-node control shutdown \
  --wait

Internally, the command will halt the automatic re-registration, wait for the node's existing registration to expire and terminate the node binary. If the node is not registered (e.g. non-validator or paratime client node) this command will immediately terminate the node binary.

caution

Failure to gracefully shutdown the node may result in the node being frozen (and potentially stake being slashed) due to the node being unavailable to service requests in an epoch that it is registered for.