The cardano-node repository is the point of integration of the ledger, consensus, networking layers. It provides the cardano-node executable which is used to participate in the Cardano network.

This is an approximate diagram of the dependencies among the different components:

stateDiagram-v2
    cn: cardano-node
    tr: trace-dispatcher
    ca: cardano-api
    co: ouroboros-consensus
    on: ouroboros-network
    cl: cardano-ledger
    p: plutus
    cn --> ca
    cn --> tr
    ca --> co
    ca --> on
    co --> on
    co --> cl
    ca --> cl
    cl --> p

The process for getting a cardano-node executable can be found in the Cardano Developer Portal.

The configuration and files required to run a cardano-node in one of the supported networks are described also in the Cardano Developer Portal.

The API documentation is published on the webpage. If you want to use the cardano-node Haskell packages from another Haskell project, you should set up CHaP to get the packages defined in this repository.

For some troubleshooting help with building or running cardano-node, the wiki has a troubleshooting page that documents some common gotchas.