This is a small PHP application designed to display status and information from the Bitcoin node daemon.

1. Requirements
2. Getting Started
3. Contributing
4. Advanced Configuration Options
5. Licensing

To run the application, you will need:

• A Bitcoin node with RPC enabled.
• A web-server with PHP installed.
• The PHP curl module - this is used to make RPC calls to the Bitcoin daemon.

This application has been tested with PHP 5.6, 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2, as well as HHVM and Nightly PHP builds, via TravisCI. PHP 5.4 and 5.5 is not supported by this application.

To get started, all you need to do is copy/rename php/config.sample.php to php/config.php and configure your node's RPC credentials. The application will connect to your node via RPC and report statistics.

To use Google Analytics, simply create a file called google_analytics.inc inside the php directory and paste your GA code into it.

The script can also periodically collect the current number of connections as well as peer protocol versions and store it for display via Google Charts on your status page.

To do this, just schedule the /stats.php script as well as the /peercount.php script to be called at whatever interval you like, then config.php to enable the chart display. You can optionally tweak the settings under the "Stats" and "Node Count" sections if you want to keep more or less data.

• /stats.php will create a graph showing the number of connections over time.
• /peercount.php will create a graph showing the most common protocol versions over time.

Below are two example crontab entries to call the scripts every five minutes via curl. It is highly recommended to only allow 127.0.0.1 to call the script, as allowing other IP addresses could lead to your node becoming vulnerable to DDoS attacks.

*/5 *  *   *   *  curl -Ssk http://127.0.0.1/stats.php > /dev/null
*/5 *  *   *   *  curl -Ssk http://127.0.0.1/peercount.php > /dev/null

To configure profile icons for your node, just set them up using the node_links variable in config.php. The format is a multi-dimensional array, as below. Icon images for Bitnodes.21.co and Blockchain.info are included in the img directory.

    'node_links' => array (
        array (
            'name' => 'bitnodes.earn.com',
            'image'=> 'img/bitnodes.earn.com.png',
            'link' => 'https://bitnodes.earn.com/nodes/[IP]-[PORT]/'
        ),
        array (
            ...
        )
    ),

To ignore any specific peer from appearing in the connections table. Write the IPv4 or IPv6 address of the peer in the array like the example below.

    'peers_to_ignore' => array (
        '192.168.0.10',
        '[2a01:4f8:121:14f7::2]'
  ),

The node count script automatically counts Core, Classic, Unlimited and BitcoinJ clients. To add more node types to the chart, simply add an entry into the peercount_extra_nodes array in config.php.

The key of the entry is an internal-only identifier, and the value is the lower-case text that should be matched in order to increment the counter.

Contributions and testing reports are extremely welcome. Please submit a pull request or issue on GitHub, and make sure that your code conforms to the PEAR PHP coding standards (Travis CI will test your pull request when it's sent).

I accept tips via Bitcoin to 1N73BsKN2bubvRo9dXbUjwe4SBHW4j4j4B - if you would like to buy me a beer, please do!

The config.php file also contains lots of options to control how the application behaves, and is separated out into loose sections:

• Do not disable cache unless you either have an alternative mechanism or your node is protected from potential DDoS attacks.

• Copyright (C) 2015 Craig Watson
• Distributed under the terms of the Apache License v2.0 - see LICENSE file for details.
• EasyBitcoin-PHP library is reproduced under the terms of the MIT licence and is used from commit 670414e.