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. 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 1.53.0 (53cb7b09b 2021-06-17)

If you really don’t want to pipe the output of curl into sh, you can also try using a Docker image and working inside of it, but that’s meant for more advanced users and won’t be covered in this guide.

At the time of writing, the project requires cargo >= 1.46.0, which is our minimum supported rust version (MSRV) as of July 2021. 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
cargo install --git https://github.com/bitcoindevkit/bdk-cli --features=esplora,compiler

# minimal install
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 0.2.1-dev
Alekos Filini <alekos.filini@gmail.com>:Riccardo Casatta <riccardo@casatta.it>:Steve Myers <steve@notmandatory.org>
Top level options and command modes

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 sub-commands
    repl       Enter REPL command loop mode
    wallet     Wallet options and sub-commands

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