Good morning my fellow Steemers!

I've seen many users start working on some reall nice applications that are built on top of the Steem blockchain and I thought that I would put out a short guide explaining how easy it is to setup a node on the testnet so you can test your application without spamming the main chain.

Building Steem for the testnet

First I'm going to assume that you have a clean install of Ubuntu ready to go. For windows users, you can follow the following article in order to install ubuntu via virtual box:
http://www.wikihow.com/Install-Ubuntu-on-VirtualBox

• Login to Ubuntu
• Update the default package list:

sudo apt-get update

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• Install required dependencies

sudo apt-get install git cmake g++ python-dev autotools-dev libicu-dev build-essential libbz2-dev libboost-all-dev libssl-dev libncurses5-dev doxygen libreadline-dev dh-autoreconf

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• Download and build Boost 1.60.0

wget -O boost_1_60_0.tar.gz http://sourceforge.net/projects/boost/files/boost/1.60.0/boost_1_60_0.tar.gz/download

tar xzvf boost_1_60_0.tar.gz

cd boost_1_60_0

./bootstrap.sh --prefix=/usr/local

./b2 install

cd

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• Build and istall secp256k1

git clone https://github.com/bitcoin/secp256k1

cd secp256k1

./autogen.sh

./configure

make

./tests

cd

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• Configure Steem for the testnet

git clone https://github.com/steemit/steem

cd steem

git submodule update --init --recursive

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DENABLE_CONTENT_PATCHING=OFF -DLOW_MEMORY_NODE=ON -DBUILD_STEEM_TESTNET=true

You should see an output line that reads:

--

             CONFIGURED FOR TEST NETWORK


--

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• Build Steem

make

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• Start your node

cd programs/steemd

./steemd --rpc-endpoint

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Congratulations you should now be able to connect to your node via RPC.

If anyone has a testnet node that I can list for people to connect to, please mention them in the comments so I can add it to the article.