Does Bitcoin full node have to be dedicated to Counterparty server?

General
1

Continuing the discussion from What is the incentive to run a Counterparty node?:

  1. Bitcoin Core by default cannot (as it doesn’t have that capability) create an index of all addresses that were used.
    A patched Bitcoin Core can do that (see BTCDrak’s Bitcoin Core releases)

  2. If you want to use a full node for “general stuff” (e.g. your Bitcoin Core wallet, or any other bitcoin apps that you want to use) and also for Counterparty server at the same time, that can be done, but counterparty server (counterparty-lib) requires address index, that’s why we chose to use BTCDrak’s version which contains this patch. All apps can use the same Bitcoin Core instance the usual way.

http://counterparty.io/docs/ has info related to installation steps (and it’s a user-friendly format for the docs repo at https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/Documentation.

Specifically, follow these steps to install Bitcoin Core (from BTCDrak), and then these to install counterparty-cli.
If you’re on Linux, you can search this forum for more recent Q&A and how-to’s such as this.