Adding a new peer to existing organization in Hyperledger Fabric

Prerequisites

To add a new peer a fully configured Fabric network must be present already, i.e. a Fabric network which has Orderers, Peers, Channels (with all Peers already in the channels) and the organization to which the peer is being added. The corresponding crypto materials should also be present in their respective Hashicorp Vault.

NOTE: Addition of a new peer has been tested on an existing network which is created by BAF. Networks created using other methods may be suitable but this has not been tested by BAF team.

Modifying Configuration File

Refer this guide for details on editing the configuration file.

While modifying the configuration file(network.yaml) for adding new peer, all the existing peers should have peerstatus tag as existing and the new peers should have peerstatus tag as new under network.channels eg.

network:
  channels:
  - channel:
    ..
    ..
    participants:
    - organization:
      peers:
      - peer:
        ..
        ..
        peerstatus: new  # new for new peers(s)
      - peer:
        ..
        ..
        peerstatus: existing  # existing for existing peers(s)

and under network.organizations as

network:
  organizations:
    - organization:
      ..
      ..
      services:
        peers:
        - peer:
          ..
          ..
          peerstatus: new   # new for new peers(s)
        - peer:
          ..
          ..
          peerstatus: existing   # existing for existing peers(s)

The network.yaml file should contain the specific network.organization patch along with the orderer information.

For reference, see network-fabric-add-peer.yaml file here.

Run playbook

The add-peer.yaml playbook is used to add a new peer to an existing organization in the existing network. This can be done using the following command

ansible-playbook add-peer.yaml --extra-vars "@path-to-network.yaml" -e "add_new_org='false'" -e "add_peer='true'"

NOTE: The peerstatus is not required when the network is deployed for the first time. If you have additional applications, please deploy them as well.