Shielded Vote Zebra zcashd-compat Setup

Integration Summary

This is a Zebra binary that manages a zcashd child process. Zebra is responsible for consensus and P2P; zcashd is kept for wallet and zcashd-compatible RPC surfaces. zcashd ingests chain and mempool data from Zebra over authenticated RPC.

Trust boundary: zcashd trusts the configured Zebra node for block source and transaction forwarding.
Transport: zcashd talks to Zebra over RPC only (no zcashd P2P in compat mode).
Auth: keep Zebra cookie auth enabled and avoid exposing RPC publicly.
Lifecycle: supervised mode restarts zcashd with backoff and graceful shutdown handling.
Health: verify readiness with zcash-cli getzebracompatinfo.

Configuration

Start Zebra In zcashd-compat Mode

Default path: one Zebra binary. Zebra resolves a hash-pinned compatible zcashd build, starts it as a child process, and supervises restarts.
```
zebrad start --zcashd-compat
```

Minimal Config

Keep supervision enabled so Zebra manages install + lifecycle.

[zcashd_compat]
enabled = true
manage_zcashd = true
zcashd_source = "managed"

Build Binaries

Build Zebra and zcashd from source.

# in zebrad tree
cargo build --release

# in zcashd tree
./zcutil/build.sh -j"$(nproc)"

Run Manually (No Supervision)

Configure manually and run zcashd against Zebra RPC.

# zebra config
[zcashd_compat]
enabled = true
manage_zcashd = false

# start zebra
zebrad start --zcashd-compat

# start zcashd
./src/zcashd -zebra-compat \
  -zebra-compat-url=http://127.0.0.1:8232 \
  -zebra-compat-cookiefile=/path/to/zebra/.cookie

# verify
./src/zcash-cli getzebracompatinfo

Zebra zcashd-compat

Integration Summary

Configuration

Start Zebra In zcashd-compat Mode

Minimal Config

Build Binaries

Run Manually (No Supervision)

Docker