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Basic Usage

Configuration​

Manual configuration is not necessary for most use cases, but example configuration files may be found in the docker/ directory.

By default, the configuration files are named server.conf and client.conf and are located in the following directories:

  • Linux: ~/.config/counterparty/
  • Windows: %APPDATA%\Counterparty\

Client and server log files are named counterparty.client.[testnet.]log and counterparty.server.[testnet.]log and are located in the following directories:

  • Linux: ~/.cache/counterparty/log/
  • Windows: %APPDATA%\Local\Counterparty\counterparty\Logs

Counterparty API activity is logged to server.[testnet.]api.log and client.[testnet.]api.log.

Counterparty database files are by default named counterparty.[testnet.]db and are located in the following directories:

  • Linux: ~/.local/share/counterparty
  • Windows: %APPDATA%\Roaming\Counterparty\counterparty

All configurable parameters in the configuration file can also be passed as arguments to the counterpart-server command. Use counterparty-server --help to see the list of these options.

Counterparty CLI​

  • NOTE: The counterparty-client CLI is currently non-functional and unsupported.

Quickly Catch Up with the Network​

You will not be able to run counterparty-server until addrindexrs has caught up (and its RPC server is running), which in turn requires bitcoind have caught up as well. The command to start the Counterparty server process is simply counterparty-server start. However, simply running this command requires a long time to catch up with the network, and Counterparty must have parsed all published blocks before being operational.

There are two ways to speed up the process of catching up with the network:

  1. counterparty-server bootstrap downloads a recent snapshot of a Counterparty database from a centralized server maintained by the Counterparty Core development team. Because this method does not involve verifying the history of Counterparty transactions yourself, the bootstrap command should not be used for mission-critical, commercial or public-facing nodes.
counterparty-server bootstrap
  1. counterparty-server kickstart will perform a complete catchup in around 8 to 24 hours. However, this method requires first stopping Bitcoin Core (while leaving addrindexrs running, so that Counterparty Core can read the Bitcoin block files directly from bitcoind's database.
counterparty-server kickstart

Start the Server​

Once the Counterparty server has caught up with the network, you may start the server simply with counterparty start:

counterparty-server start

Note: During database initialization, counterparty-server performs a database integrity check. Depending on your configuration, this operation may take more or less time. You can disable this check with the --skip-db-check flag.