Manage Local Wallet with clio
Prerequisites
- You have successfully installed Wire Sysio and Wire CDT on your computer and you have a local chain running. See Install Dependencies & Start a local node article.
The install process has already set up the wallet for the root user. To interact with clio, ensure you are on the root user. Run sudo su - to switch to the root user before proceeding with the tutorial.
Overview
Wallets store public-private key pairs, which are needed for signing operations performed on the blockchain. They can be accessed through the use of clio command line tool. This section explains how to create, manage, and unlock wallets using the clio CLI, including generating and importing keys into wallets. For more information on clio commands and usage, refer to clio's CLI Reference.
We have already created a wallet during the installation process. This is the default wallet. You can create additional wallets if you want to keep your keys separate, giving you greater control over how different key sets are managed.
Open the Wallet
Wallets are closed by default when starting a kiod instance, to begin, run the following
clio wallet open
Run the following to return a list of wallets.
clio wallet list
Output:
Wallets:
[
"default"
]
Unlock a Wallet
The kiod wallet(s) have been opened, but is still locked.
clio wallet unlock
You will be prompted for your wallet password that was saved when the wallet was first created (during installation process with wire-cli), paste it and press enter.:
clio wallet unlock --password $(cat /opt/wire-network/secrets/wallet_password.txt)
You could also use the unlock script:
/opt/wire-network/unlock_wallet.sh
Execute the command below:
clio wallet list
This should output the following result:
Wallets:
[
"default *"
]
The asterisk (*) next to the name means that the wallet is currently unlocked.
Create and Import keys into your wallet
To generate a key pair directly within the wallet, you could use clio wallet create_key command.
clio wallet create_key
Output:
Created new private key with a public key of: "SYS8PEJ5FM42xLpHK...X6PymQu97KrGDJQY5Y"
You can check your key pairs with the following command:
clio wallet private_keys --password "$(cat /opt/wire-network/secrets/wallet_password.txt)"
Save the public key somewhere safe as you would need it in the upcoming tutorials.
You could set it as environment variable:
export PUBLIC_KEY=public-key-value
Import the Development Key
Every new Wire chain has a default system user called sysio. This account is used to setup the chain by deploying system contracts that handle essential functions related to resource management, governance and consensus of the chain. Every new Wire chain also comes with a development key, and this key is the same and it is used to sign transactions on behalf of the sysio user.
wire-cli has already generated— and securely stored a unique sysio key at
/opt/wire-network/secrets/sysio_key.txt.
You can still use the development key for testing purposes and creating new accounts, which we will explore in future tutorials. To import the development key into your wallet, run the following command:
clio wallet import
You'll be prompted for a private key, enter the private key below:
5KQwrPbwdL6PhXujxW37FSSQZ1JiwsST4cqQzDeyXtP79zkvFD3
Public key: SYS6MRyAjQq8ud7hVNYcfnVPJqcVpscN5So8BhtHuGYqET5GDW5CV
Never use the development key for a production account! Doing so will most certainly result in the loss of access to your account.
Create a Wallet
To create a wallet using clio, you can either print the password to the console or save it in a specific file. For simplicity and recommended only for development, use the --to-console option:
clio wallet create --name=extra-wallet --to-console
For production environments, it is strongly recommended to use the --file option to avoid having your wallet password recorded in your shell history.
clio wallet create --name=extra-wallet --file my-secret-pass.txt