Shutting Down a Node

When a node registers for an epoch, it is committing to being available to service requests for the entire epoch. Due to this availability commitment, validator and non-client paratime nodes must be shutdown gracefully to avoid network disruption.

The graceful shutdown process involves the following steps:

1. Halt the automatic re-registration.
2. Wait for the node’s existing registration to expire.
3. Terminate the node binary.

To have the node gracefully shutdown, run:

# 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 a full epoch to complete.
oasis-node control shutdown \
  --wait

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.

Restarting a Shutdown Node​

To prevent restart loops causes by service managers, and to ensure that the node will shutdown when requested, the node will persist a flag indicating that a shutdown is in progress.

Oasis nodes prior to 22.0.3 will require that once a node is gracefully shutdown, the next time it is launched, the --worker.registration.force_register command line argument or equivalent config option be passed to the node the next time the node is started, or the node will shutdown immediately.

This behavior has been changed in newer revisions of the software such that the flag should no longer be required.