cardano-wallet

 

What is cardano-wallet?

cardano-wallet is a wallet that helps exchanges by managing UTXO's, creating, and signing transactions. It can be used to send and receive payments on the Cardano blockchain.

This project provides an HTTP Application Programming Interface (API) and a command-line interface (CLI) for working with your wallet.

Prerequisites for running cardano-wallet

The cardano-wallet has been built for and tested on Linux and will support Docker as a target environment. It may also run on Mac OS X or Windows operating systems, but they are not officially supported.

The cardano-wallet is designed to work with cardano-node. Additionally, the following git repository cardano-node needs to be checked out.

cardano-wallet web API reference

cardano-wallet includes a Web API as an extensible framework for building HTTP based services that can be accessed in different applications on different platforms such as web, windows, mobile, etc. 

Currently, the cardano-wallet web API provides a series of methods GET and POST to obtain and create information to and from the Cardano network. Documentation for explorer web API is available here.

cardano-wallet CLI

Cardano-wallet comes with a command-line interface that can be used as a quick alternative to cURL or wget to interact with a server running on the localhost. Every endpoint of the API is mapped to a corresponding command which often offers a better user experience than directly interacting with the API as a human (API are for programs, command-lines are for humans).

The command line also provides some useful helpers like a command to generate mnemonic sentences or doing key derivation. For more details, see the wallet command-line user manual.

Building and Running cardano-wallet

Option 1: To build the cardano-wallet API using Docker (Recommended):

Alternatively, all components are built automatically using docker-compose. To build all components using docker-compose see the following GitHub pages for instructions here

Once you have completed these steps, you will be able to use the cardano-wallet API to view data from the PostgreSQL database, and the submit transaction API to submit transactions.

Option 2: To build the cardano-wallet using Nix:

Follow the instructions in cardano-wallet/wiki/Building#nix to install Nix and set up the IOHK binary cache.

How to build cardano-wallet using Nix

Additional logging

serve accepts extra command-line arguments for logging (also called “tracing”). Use --help-tracing to show the options, the tracer names, and the possible log levels.

cardano-wallet serve --help-tracing

Additional tracing options:

--log-level SEVERITY Global minimum severity for a message to be logged.
Defaults to "DEBUG" unless otherwise configured.
--trace-NAME=off Disable logging on the given tracer.
--trace-NAME=SEVERITY Set the minimum logging severity for the given
tracer. Defaults to "INFO".

The possible log levels (lowest to highest) are:
debug info notice warning error critical alert emergency

The possible tracers are:
application	About start-up logic and the server's surroundings.
api-server	About the HTTP API requests and responses.
wallet-engine	About background wallet workers events and core wallet engine.
wallet-db	About database operations of each wallet.
pools-engine	About the background worker monitoring stake pools and stake pools engine.
pools-db	About database operations on stake pools.
ntp-client	About ntp-client.
network	About network communication with the node.

EXAMPLE
Use these options to enable debug-level tracing for certain components of the wallet. For example, to log all database queries for the wallet databases, use:

$ cardano-wallet serve --trace-wallet-db=debug ...