How can a private network be created besides Mainnet and Testnet?

Question

I've came across this 2 year old question in Stack Overflow, I'm starting a side project at work to explore the potential of Cardano.

There is an old documentation page that mentions cardano-sl component which has been currently decomposed into several others.

This other page(https://developers.cardano.org/docs/get-started/running-cardano), reads:

Alternatively, you can spin up your own custom Cardano network, but that is outside the scope of this guide.

Bottom line the question is whether it is possible to create custom private Cardano networks besides the mainnet and testnet networks, and if so, where can we find documentation about that process.

Answer 1

It is definitely possible to do that. You can edit genesis and config files to your taste. Creating a local network is the purpose of the script here and there is a guide here.

There is also a similar set of config files for jumpstarting in Alonzo here

Answer 2

I'm not very familiar where you would find the right documentation, but it certainly is possible to have multiple cardano-node be connecting to each other, forming a private network. Such a network could also be configured as you like and run with completely different parameters.

One starting point maybe is to have a look how the cardano-wallet does launch a cluster of cardano-nodes locally for testing purposes: https://github.com/input-output-hk/cardano-wallet/blob/master/lib/shelley/exe/local-cluster.hs This document also has some explanations on how the network is configured and what data (faucets) gets prepared in the code.