Installation

Requirements

The only requirement to run the bdk-cli tool is a Linux/macOS system with a fairly recent Rust toolchain installed. Since Linux distros tend to lag behind with updates, the quickest way to install the Rust compiler and Cargo is rustup.rs (opens new window). You can head there and follow their instructions, after which you can test if everything went fine by running cargo version, which should print something like:

cargo 1.56.0 (4ed5d137b 2021-10-04)

As an alternative to installing the Rust toolchain, you can try using a Docker image (opens new window) and working inside of it, but that's meant for more advanced users and won't be covered in this guide.

Note

At the time of writing, the project requires cargo >= 1.56.0, which is our minimum supported rust version (MSRV) as of May 2022. If you have an older version installed with rustup.rs, you can upgrade it with rustup update.

Installing the bdk-cli tool

Once Cargo is installed, you can proceed to install the interactive bdk-cli tool directly from the GitHub repository, by running:

# all features with the blocking esplora client 
cargo install --git https://github.com/bitcoindevkit/bdk-cli --features=esplora-ureq,compiler

# all features with the async esplora client 
cargo install --git https://github.com/bitcoindevkit/bdk-cli --features=esplora-reqwest,compiler

# minimal install (only repl feature is on by default)
cargo install --git https://github.com/bitcoindevkit/bdk-cli

This command may take a while to finish, since it will fetch and compile all the dependencies and the bdk library itself.

Once it's done, you can check if everything went fine by running bdk-cli --help which should print something like this:

bdk-cli 0.5.0
Alekos Filini <alekos.filini@gmail.com>:Riccardo Casatta <riccardo@casatta.it>:Steve Myers <steve@notmandatory.org>
The BDK Command Line Wallet App

bdk-cli is a light weight command line bitcoin wallet, powered by BDK. This app can be used as a playground as well as
testing environment to simulate various wallet testing situations. If you are planning to use BDK in your wallet, bdk-
cli is also a great intro tool to get familiar with the BDK API.

But this is not just any toy. bdk-cli is also a fully functioning Bitcoin wallet with taproot support!


USAGE:
    bdk-cli [OPTIONS] <SUBCOMMAND>

FLAGS:
    -h, --help       
            Prints help information

    -V, --version    
            Prints version information


OPTIONS:
    -n, --network <NETWORK>    
            Sets the network [default: testnet]


SUBCOMMANDS:
    compile    Compile a miniscript policy to an output descriptor
    help       Prints this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)
    key        Key Management Operations
    repl       REPL command loop mode
    wallet     Wallet Operations

An example command to sync a testnet wallet to a default electrum server looks like this:

bdk-cli wallet -w example --descriptor "wpkh(tprv8ZgxMBicQKsPexGYyaFwnAsCXCjmz2FaTm6LtesyyihjbQE3gRMfXqQBXKM43DvC1UgRVv1qom1qFxNMSqVAs88qx9PhgFnfGVUdiiDf6j4/0/*)" sync