Pruning

WARNING: pruning and full node are experimental features of Reth, and available only on main branch of the main repository now.

By default, Reth runs as an archive node. Such nodes have all historical blocks and the state at each of these blocks available for querying and tracing.

Reth also supports pruning of historical data and running as a full node. This chapter will walk through the steps for running Reth as a full node, what caveats to expect and how to configure your own pruned node.

Basic concepts

Archive node – Reth node that has all historical data from genesis.
Pruned node – Reth node that has its historical data pruned partially or fully through a custom configuration.
Full Node – Reth node that has the latest state and historical data for only the last 128 blocks available for querying in the same way as an archive node.

The node type that was chosen when first running a node can not be changed after the initial sync. Turning Archive into Pruned, or Pruned into Full is not supported.

Modes

Archive Node

Default mode, follow the steps from the previous chapter on how to run on mainnet or official testnets.

Full Node

To run Reth as a full node, follow the steps from the previous chapter on how to run on mainnet or official testnets, and add a --full flag. For example:

RUST_LOG=info reth node \
    --full \
    --authrpc.jwtsecret /path/to/secret \
    --authrpc.addr 127.0.0.1 \
    --authrpc.port 8551

Pruned Node

To run Reth as a pruned node configured through a custom configuration, modify the reth.toml file and run Reth in the same way as archive node by following the steps from the previous chapter on how to run on mainnet or official testnets.

Size

All numbers are as of August 2023 at block number 17.9M for mainnet.

Full

Full node occupies 1TB at the peak, and slowly goes down to 920GB.

Pruned

Different parts take up different amounts of disk space. If pruned fully, this is the total freed space you'll get, per part:

Part	Size
Sender Recovery	70GB
Transaction Lookup	140GB
Receipts	240GB
Account History	230GB
Storage History	680GB

RPC support

As it was mentioned in the pruning configuration chapter, there are several parts which can be pruned independently of each other:

Sender Recovery
Transaction Lookup
Receipts
Account History
Storage History

Pruning of each of these parts disables different RPC methods, because the historical data or lookup indexes become unavailable.

TODO: prune parts / RPC methods table that shows which RPCs becomes unavailable when certain parts of the data are pruned

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