Chia-Tea Quick Start

This guide is for getting started using Chia-Tea.

What can I do with Chia-Tea?

There are currently three major use-cases:

Copy plots between drives
Monitoring of a single or multi-machine chia farm
Discord bot to give notifications and allow interaction

How to install Chia-Tea?

You can install it as usualy by using the python package manager:

python -m pip install chia-tea

Alternatively you can also clone the repo and install the code manually:

git clone https://github.com/Tea-n-Tech/chia-tea.git
python -m pip install poetry
python -m poetry install
python -m poetry build
python -m pip install dist/*.whl

How to configure Chia-Tea?

To create a config simply run:

chia-tea config init

All configurations are stored in a config.yml file. Every cli tools uses this config and searches by default for a file ~/.chia_tea/config/config.yml. You can get the path to the config by running

chia-tea config location

If you create the config in another location, you can also specify the path to the config by using the --config option for every start command.

After creating the config and possibly adapting it, you can start processes as listed below.

How to start the copy tool?

You can start the copy tool with:

chia-tea start copy

It will then copy plots between the copy.source_folders drives to the copy.target_folders drives as specified in the config.yml.

How to monitor my farm?

You initialized already the config but also need certificates to secure the connection between server and client. To create the certificates simply run:

chia-tea config create-certificates

And they will be created next to the config. The certificates work by default only on your machine! If you have a setup over a network, you must specify the monitoring server name with the option --common-name or you will get a No match found for server name error on the server when clients try to connect to it. The server name can be the ip address or a url. As a note, the client only requires the .crt certificate file and not the private .key file.

The monitoring server receives all monitoring data and stores it in a file called monitoring.db, but this can be changed in the config under monitoring.server.db_filepath. You can start the server now by running:

chia-tea start monitoring-server

After starting a server you can connect an arbitrary amount of clients to it. Clients are programs run on machines you want to monitor. A client collects data from the hardware, processes and chia and sends it to the server. You can control the the data collection frequency in the config under monitoring.client but the default should suffice for the beginning.

Simply run the following command and Chia-Tea will collect and send all data automatically to the server:

chia-tea start monitoring-client

We have a discord bot as a user interface to the database. It will notify you on any important events and provide commands to get further insights.

Before you can run the bot you will need a Discord Bot Token and also the id of your channel. Specify this once again in the config.yml under discord.

You can run the bot with:

chia-tea start discord-bot

And here you go, you are all set up.