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12.4: Accessing Bitcoind with Node
NOTE: This is a draft in progress, so that I can get some feedback from early reviewers. It is not yet ready for learning.
Accessing the bitcoind doesn't require curl. All you need is simple RPC functionality. That's what's provided by BCRPC by kallewoof of Digital Garage.
Set Up Node.js
BCRPC is built on node.js. Thus, you'll first need to install the node.js and npm (node package manager) packages for your system.
If you're using a Ubuntu machine, you can run the following commands to get a new version of node.js (as opposed to the horribly out-of-date version in the Ubuntu package system).
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_8.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
sudo apt-get install mocha -g
Set Up BCRPC
You should next download BCRPC from the BCRPC Repository. Clone it or download it, as you prefer.
Once you've done that, you can finish setting it up:
$ unzip bcrpc-master.zip
$ cd bcrpc-master
$ npm install
Test BCRPC
To test the BCRPC package, you must first set environmental variables for your rpcuser and rpcpassword. As noted in §12.1: Accessing Bitcoind with Curl, these come from ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf.
$ export BITCOIND_USER=bitcoinrpc
$ export BITCOIND_PASS=d8340efbcd34e312044c8431c59c792c
WARNING: Obviously, you'd never put set your password in an environmental variable in a production environment.
You can now verify everything is working correctly:
$ npm test
> bcrpc@0.0.5 test /home/user1/bcrpc-master
> mocha tests.js
BitcoinD
✓ is running
bcrpc
✓ can get info
2 passing (36ms)
Congratulations, you now have a Bitcoin-ready RPC wrapper for node.js.