# How to install and run a Substrate node on the BBQ-Birch testnet

This simple guide helps beginners get a Substrate node up and running. If you're not a developer and want to run a node, there's not much more you can do right now other than contribute your bandwidth and computer power, which is still helpful :)

1. Install Rust

- `curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh`

2. Then install the supporting software. Some Linux distributions may not require `libssl-dev` to be installed (again).

- `sudo apt install make clang pkg-config libssl-dev`

3. Add cargo to your bash profile. In most Linux distributions, it is found in your home directory under `.bash_profile`. Simply add `export PATH="$HOME/.cargo/bin:$PATH"` to the end of the file and save. Restart your terminal for this to take effect.

4. Update Rust

- `rustup update`

5. Download the latest version of Substrate, initialize, and build.

git clone https://github.com/paritytech/substrate.git
cd substrate/
git checkout bbq-birch
./scripts/init.sh (may not be necessary due to preceding 'rustup update')
./scripts/build.sh
cargo build --release

**Note:** if you're getting an error when building on Linux, you may have to build Substrate using this command:

`OPENSSL_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/include/openssl-1.0 OPENSSL_LIB_DIR=/usr/lib/openssl-1.0 cargo build --release
`

6. Run Substrate

- `target/release/substrate --name YOUR_NODE_NAME`

### Navigate to the UI

Once you have a BBQ Birch node running (or want to play with a substrate dev client), here is some really early UI support that will connect to your locally running node - https://polkadot.js.org/apps/next/

When I say really early, I mean it still has some very obvious rough edges in functionality that doesn't quite work as expected yet. We are working through those in the next day or two, nothing tricky, just need to get to everything touched and looked at.

Things that work - chain state queries, transfers
Things that (should) work, i.e. some last bits of testing needed here - democracy, staking
Things that halfway work - extrinsics app (some functions don't as of yet). explorer (needs the exploded block views on click-through)
This that have not had focus - RPC queries app, you can select but not execute

Order of attack for the remaining items, same order as listed above. The good news is that the same exhaustive changes needed for this is also in poc-3, so no delays when that one lands.