btcwallet

btcwallet is a daemon handling bitcoin wallet functions. It relies on a running btcd instance for asynchronous blockchain queries and notifications over websockets.

In addition to the HTTP server run by btcd to provide RPC and websocket connections, btcwallet requires an HTTP server of its own to provide websocket connections to wallet frontends. Websockets allow for asynchronous queries, replies, and notifications.

This project is currently under active development is not production ready yet.

Usage

Frontends wishing to use btcwallet must connect to the websocket /wallet. Messages sent to btcwallet over this websocket are expected to follow the standard Bitcoin JSON API and replies follow the same API. The btcd package btcjson provides types and functions for creating messages that this API. However, due to taking a synchronous protocol like RPC and using it asynchronously, it is recommend for frontends to use the JSON id field as a sequence number so replies can be mapped back to the messages they originated from.

Installation

btcwallet can be installed with the go get command:

go get github.com/conformal/btcwallet

Running

To run btcwallet, you must have btcd installed and running. By default btcd will run its HTTP server for RPC and websocket connections on port 8332. However, bitcoind frontends expecting wallet functionality may require to poll on port 8332, requiring the btcd component in a btcwallet+btcd replacement stack to run on an alternate port. For this reason, btcwallet by default connects to btcd on port 8334 and runs its own HTTP server on 8332. When using both btcd and btcwallet, it is recommend to run btcd on the non-standard port 8334 using the -r command line flag.

Assumming btcd is running on port 8334, btcwallet can be started by running:

btcwallet -f /path/to/wallet

GPG Verification Key

All official release tags are signed by Conformal so users can ensure the code has not been tampered with and is coming from Conformal. To verify the signature perform the following:

• Download the public key from the Conformal website at https://opensource.conformal.com/GIT-GPG-KEY-conformal.txt

• Import the public key into your GPG keyring:

  gpg --import GIT-GPG-KEY-conformal.txt
  

• Verify the release tag with the following command where TAG_NAME is a placeholder for the specific tag:

  git tag -v TAG_NAME
  

What works

• New addresses can be queried if they are in the wallet file address pool
• Unknown commands are sent to btcd
• Unhandled btcd notifications (i.e. new blockchain height) are sent to each connected frontend
• btcd replies are routed back to the correct frontend who initiated the request

TODO

• Require authentication before wallet functionality can be accessed
• Serve websocket connections over TLS
• Documentation
• Code cleanup
• Optimize
• Much much more. Stay tuned.

License

btcwallet is licensed under the liberal ISC License.