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Run a Nym network requester

Summary. Goblin egresses the mixnet through a network requester: the exit that forwards your traffic to relays and HTTPS hosts. Goblin ships with a default, but you can run your own for reliability and point wallets at it with one environment variable.

Motivation

The network requester is the last mixnet hop before the open internet. Using a requester you operate means you’re not depending on a third party’s exit for your community’s payments, and you can keep it close to the relays and name authority you also run. Goblin uses the standard requester (with a normal exit policy) rather than an open proxy.

How it works

A nym-network-requester is initialized once (it registers with a gateway and gets a mixnet address), then run as a long-lived service. Its address is what wallets target. A wallet picks the requester from either:

  • the baked-in default (NETWORK_REQUESTER in goblin/src/nym/sidecar.rs), or
  • the GOBLIN_NYM_PROVIDER environment variable at runtime (overrides the default).

Deploying

# 1. build or obtain a portable nym-network-requester binary
# 2. initialize (registers with a gateway; standard exit policy, NOT an open proxy)
nym-network-requester init --id my-requester
# 3. run it as a service (systemd unit, restart on failure)
nym-network-requester run --id my-requester
# 4. note the printed mixnet address; that's the "provider"

Then either set GOBLIN_NYM_PROVIDER=<address> in the wallet’s environment, or bake it into NETWORK_REQUESTER and rebuild. The project includes a reference deploy script (deploy-nym-requester.sh) that builds a portable (glibc-2.17) binary, installs a systemd unit, initializes the requester, and prints its address; adapt the host specifics to your own server.

Reference

  • Where the address is consumed: goblin/src/nym/sidecar.rs (NETWORK_REQUESTER, provider(), GOBLIN_NYM_PROVIDER).
  • Reference deploy automation: deploy-nym-requester.sh (project root).
  • The in-process client that dials it: The in-process mixnet client.

References