ipc-exporter-rust

Prometheus metrics exporter for Bitcoin Core using IPC (Cap'n Proto over Unix socket). Connects directly to Bitcoin Core's multiprocess mode — no RPC or REST calls involved.

How it works

The exporter subscribes to Bitcoin Core's ChainNotifications interface over IPC for real-time event counters (blocks connected/disconnected, mempool changes, flushes) and polls the Chain and Node interfaces every 60 seconds for gauges (height, mempool stats, peer count, bandwidth). Metrics are served in Prometheus text format over HTTP.

See METRICS.md for the full metrics reference.

Prerequisites

Bitcoin Core must be built with multiprocess support (bitcoin-node binary). The flake provides a pre-built package from ryanofsky/bitcoin@pr/ipc:

nix build .#bitcoin-node

Building

Requires capnproto at build time for schema codegen.

With Nix (recommended):

nix build

Or inside a dev shell:

nix develop -c cargo build --release

Usage

ipc-exporter-rust [--debug] [--metrics-addr HOST:PORT] <socket-path>

Flag	Default	Description
--debug	off	Verbose per-event logging to stderr
--metrics-addr	127.0.0.1:9332	Prometheus endpoint listen address
<socket-path>	required	Path to bitcoind's IPC Unix socket

Example:

ipc-exporter-rust /var/lib/bitcoind/node.sock

Then scrape http://127.0.0.1:9332/metrics with Prometheus.

NixOS module

The flake exports a NixOS module for running the exporter as a systemd service:

# flake.nix
{
  inputs.ipc-exporter.url = "github:bitcoin-dev-tools/ipc-exporter-rust";

  outputs = { nixpkgs, ipc-exporter, ... }: {
    nixosConfigurations.myhost = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
      modules = [
        ipc-exporter.nixosModules.default
        ({ ... }: {
          services.bitcoind-ipc-exporter = {
            enable = true;
            package = ipc-exporter.packages.x86_64-linux.default;
            socketPath = "/var/lib/bitcoind/node.sock";
            user = "bitcoind";
            group = "bitcoind";
            after = [ "bitcoind.service" ];
            bindsTo = [ "bitcoind.service" ];
          };
        })
      ];
    };
  };
}

See CLAUDE.md for the full list of module options.

License

MIT