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A modern Altcoin Core REST and RPC client to execute administrative tasks, wallet operations and queries about network and the blockchain.

Install the package via npm:

The network will automatically determine the port to connect to, just like the bitcoind and bitcoin-cli commands.

By default, when ssl is enabled, strict checking is implicitly enabled.

For compatibility with other Altcoin Core clients.

Since version v0.14.0, it is possible to send commands via the JSON-RPC interface using named parameters instead of positional ones. This comes with the advantage of making the order of arguments irrelevant. It also helps improving the readability of certain function calls when leaving out arguments for their default value.

For instance, take the getBalance() call written using positional arguments:

It is functionally equivalent to using the named arguments account and minconf, leaving out include_watchonly (defaults to false):

This feature is available to all JSON-RPC methods that accept arguments.

Due to JavaScript's limited floating point precision, all big numbers (numbers with more than 15 significant digits) are returned as strings to prevent precision loss. This includes both the RPC and REST APIs.

By default, all methods are exposed on the client independently of the version it is connecting to. This is the most flexible option as defining methods for unavailable RPC calls does not cause any harm and the library is capable of handling a Method not found response error correctly.

However, if you prefer to be on the safe side, you can enable strict version checking. This will validate all method calls before executing the actual RPC request:

If you want to enable strict version checking for the bleeding edge version, you may set a very high version number to exclude recently deprecated calls:

To avoid potential issues with prototype references, all methods are still enumerable on the library client prototype.

Start the bitcoind with the RPC server enabled and optionally configure a username and password:

These configuration values may also be set on the bitcoin.conf file of your platform installation.

By default, port 8332 is used to listen for requests in mainnet mode, or 18332 in testnet or regtest modes. Use the network property to initialize the client on the desired mode and automatically set the respective default port. You can optionally set a custom port of your choice too.

The RPC services binds to the localhost loopback network interface, so use rpcbind to change where to bind to and rpcallowip to whitelist source IP access.

All RPC methods are exposed on the client interface as a camelcase'd version of those available on bitcoind.

For a more complete reference about which methods are available, check the RPC documentation on the Altcoin Core Developer Reference website.

Batched requests are support by passing an array to the command method with a method and optionally, parameters. The return value will be an array with all the responses.

Note that batched requests will only throw an error if the batch request itself cannot be processed. However, each individual response may contain an error akin to an individual request.

Support for the REST interface is still experimental and the API is still subject to change. These endpoints are also unauthenticated so there are certain risks which you should be aware, specifically of leaking sensitive data of the node if not correctly protected.

Error handling is still fragile so avoid passing user input.

Start the bitcoind with the REST server enabled:

These configuration values may also be set on the bitcoin.conf file of your platform installation. Use txindex=1 if you'd like to enable full transaction query support (note: this will take a considerable amount of time on the first run).

Given a block hash, returns a block, in binary, hex-encoded binary or JSON formats.

Given a block hash, returns amount of block headers in upward direction.

Returns various state info regarding block chain processing.

Returns transactions in the transaction memory pool.

Returns various information about the transaction memory pool. Only supports JSON as output format.

Given a transaction hash, returns a transaction in binary, hex-encoded binary, or JSON formats.

Query unspent transaction outputs (UTXO) for a given set of outpoints. See BIP64 for input and output serialisation.

This client supports SSL out of the box. Simply pass the SSL public certificate to the client and optionally disable strict SSL checking which will bypass SSL validation (the connection is still encrypted but the server it is connecting to may not be trusted). This is, of course, discouraged unless for testing purposes when using something like self-signed certificates.

Please note that the following procedure should only be used for testing purposes.

Generate an self-signed certificate together with an unprotected private key:

On Altcoin Core <0.12, you can start the bitcoind RPC server directly with SSL:

On Altcoin Core >0.12, use must use stunnel (brew install stunnel or sudo apt-get install stunnel4) or an HTTPS reverse proxy to configure SSL since the built-in support for SSL has been removed. The trade off with stunnel is performance and simplicity versus features, as it lacks more powerful capacities such as Basic Authentication and caching which are standard in reverse proxies.

You can use stunnel by configuring stunnel.conf with the following service requirements:

The key option may be omitted if you concatenating your private and public certificates into a single stunnel.pem file.

On some versions of stunnel it is also possible to start a service using command line arguments. The equivalent would be:

Then pass the public certificate to the client:

By default, all requests made with altcoin-rpc are logged using uphold/debugnyan with altcoin-rpc as the logging namespace.

Please note that all sensitive data is obfuscated before calling the logger.

Example output defining the environment variable DEBUG=altcoin-rpc:

A custom logger can be passed via the logger option and it should implement bunyan's log levels.

Currently the test suite is tailored for Docker (including docker-compose) due to the multitude of different bitcoind configurations that are required in order to get the test suite passing.

To test using a local installation of node.js but with dependencies (e.g. bitcoind) running inside Docker:

To test using Docker exclusively (similarly to what is done in Travis CI):

MIT

Link:
GitHub - ander7agar/altcoin-rpc: A modern Bitcoin Core REST ...