How do a initialize a new moon from my Urbit planet?

Question

I have my Urbit planet running on a server which is accessible from the internet, allowing other peers to connect directly without hole-punching or proxying through a star or galaxy.

I'd like to launch separate Urbit moon instances, one for each of my personal computers. These are always behind at least one NAT layer, and may move between networks, so they will probably rely on the planet for their connectivity.

How do I initialize a new moon from my Urbit planet? Is there a command that generates a new name/ticket pair which I use during initialization, or do I need to use my planet's name and passphrase directly on the moon?

If possible, can I specify an unused moon name (within the planet's address space) to initialize that moon, instead of picking one at random?

Answer 1

This has changed. Run

|moon

from the parent planet. You'll get something like:

moon: ~baswep-navred-sampel-palnet
\/0t5cT5t.wCO6i.~e1xg.Oz0qb.QNO6I.3Kt2T.h9M9F.U3vU~.X3Qu0.gtb19.IYTkY.80kWZ.SI\/
  EUE.DXa8i.TiDof.o3-1C.RHLKS.k81M0.ecz5o.ic0Bg.600g1
\/

To start the above moon you would run:

./urbit -w baswep-navred-sampel-palnet -G 0t5cT5t.wCO6i.~e1xg.Oz0qb.QNO6I.3Kt2T.h9M9F.U3vU~.X3Qu0.gtb19.IYTkY.80kWZ.SIEUE.DXa8i.TiDof.o3-1C.RHLKS.k81M0.ecz5o.ic0Bg.600g1 -c mymoon

where mymoon is used, any arbitrary name came be given. In the future you'll start this moon with

./urbit mymoon

urbit.org has a more in depth explanation here.

Answer 2

To generate a moon from your planet, you simply enter +moon from the :dojo environment. What I'm gleaning from here is that this generates a name which you can then initialize from some device like you did for your planet. It also seems that they're tied to your planet in the same way that your planet is tied to a star.

I haven't been able to figure out many specifics from the docs, but it seems that each moon is partly synced to its parent planet and can access parts of its filesystem. This is conjecture following from the above, but I'm guessing that, whereas a planet is run on its own server instance, a moon is not. Rather, it depends on its parent planet running in order to function. I'm sure there are more details to come in the docs.