I spent some time a few weeks ago getting the HNScan backend to run on my Linux VM. After a lot of removing, reinstalling and chatting with the kind folks in the Handshake Dev Chat I was able to get it running. Below I will list the steps that worked for me.

If you’ve already installed HSD then you should start at step 0 otherwise you should start at step 3.

Step 0: If you use HSD as a wallet back up the ~/.hsd/wallet directory and when you have completed all of the steps here copy the backup back to its original location.

Step 1: Remove the hsd and .hsd directories.

Step 2: Reboot (probably not required).

Step 3: Reinstall HSD but don’t run it (instructions here).

Step 4: Change to the hsd directory.

Step 5: Install HNScan (instructions here).

Step 6: Run HSD with the following arguments:

—index-tx=true —index-address=true —plugins=hnscan

Step 7: Give HSD about 30 minutes to sync with the blockchain. I run HSD on my Linux VM in a tmux session. When syncing every 5000 or so blocks Ubuntu would kill HSD for using too much memory. I would then run HSD again with the arguments above and it would continue the sync from the block where it got killed. I had to run HSD about ten times before it was fully synced.

Step 8: When fully synced test HNScan is running by sending the following request to HSD:

curl “127.0.0.1:8080/txs?height=14000&limit=10&offset=0”

Feel free to reach out to me if you have trouble with any of the above.