Learning-Bitcoin-from-the-Command-Line/4_3_Creating_a_Raw_Transaction_with_Named_Arguments.md

4.3 Creating a Raw Transaction with Named Arguments

NOTE: This is a draft in progress, so that I can get some feedback from early reviewers. It is not yet ready for learning.

It can sometimes be daunting to figure out the right order for the arguments to a bitcoin-cli command. Fortunately, you can use named arguments as an alternative.

VERSION WARNING: This is an innovation from Bitcoin Core v 0.14.0. If you used our setup scripts, that's what you should have, but double-check your version if you have any problems.

Create a Named Argument Alias

To use a named argument you must run bitcoin-cli with the -named argument. If you plan to do this regularly, you'll probably want to create an alias:

alias bitcoin-cli="bitcoin-cli -named"

As usual, that's for your ease of use, but we'll continue using the whole commands, to maintain clarity.

Test Out a Named Argument

To learn what the names are for the arguments of a command, just look at bitcoin-cli help. It will list the arguments in their proper order, but will now also give names for each of them.

For example, bitcoin-cli getbalance lists the following arguments:

1. account
2. minconf
3. include watchonly

The following shows a traditional, unintuitive usage of getbalance with minconf:

$ bitcoin-cli getbalance "*" 1

With named arguments you can now call it like this, which improves clarities and minimizes mistakes:

$ bitcoin-cli -named getbalance account="*" minconf=1

Test Out a Raw Transaction

Here's what all the commands for sending a raw transaction would look like with named arguments: