libbitcoinrpc staging tree

A C library for JSON-RPC Bitcoin API.

The library provides basic routines to send RPC queries to a listening Bitcoin node, fetch responses and analyse errors. Currently, the code is tested against the following versions of Bitcoin Core: v0.10.4, v0.11.2, v0.12.0.

To build the shared library

Please make sure that you have all the required dependencies installed. Then type in the project folder:

make

to compile a dynamically linked library and put it in .lib/.

If you want to clean the directory of compiled files and start from scratch, use:

make clean  

You can also build and perform unit testing with bitcoind daemon in regtest mode:

make test

This assumes that you have bitcoind and bitcoin-cli executables installed on your system.

Build dependencies

These dependencies are required:

Library	Purpose	Description
curl	send data over HTTP	tested with >=libcurl-7.14.0
jansson	JSON parsing	tested with >=libjansson-2.2.1
uuid	generate UUIDs	tested with >=libuuid-2.20.1

To install the build dependencies on Ubuntu, please type the following command:

sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev libjansson-dev uuid-dev

(or other libcurl4-*-dev flavour).

Installation

To install the successfully compiled source on Unix type systems, please type:

make install

as a privileged user (on Debian-like systems: sudo make install). By default, it will install the library in /usr/local/lib and the header file in /usr/local/include. It will also install documentation files in /usr/share/doc/bitcoinrpc, as well as man pages that all start with: 'bitcoinrpc'. You can specify the variable INSTALL_PREFIX to install sources to some other destination (e.g. chrooted file system).

On some systems, especially Ubuntu, the directory /usr/local/lib is not included by default to the ldconfig search path. So either you change the Makefile's INSTALL_LIBPATH value from /usr/local/lib to /usr/lib (which may be not a very good idea, since most of the libraries installed by apt-get are there), or add the following line to your /etc/ld.so.conf:

/usr/local/lib

and run:

sudo ldconfig

See man 8 ldconfig for more information.

To remove the files, type:

make uninstall

Usage

To use the library, it is enough to include the header file:

#include <bitcoinrpc.h>

in your source code and provide the following linker flag during compilation:

-lbitcoinrpc

For further information, see documentation in doc/ and the header file: src/bitcoinrpc.h.

Please notice that the code is in the very early stage of development.

History

See Changelog.md and CREDITS.

License

The source code is released under the terms of the MIT license. Please, see LICENSE for more information.

last updated: 2016-02-23