Hello Nigiri!

Vulpem Ventures
2 min readMay 22, 2019

Today we announce a new tool for Bitcoin developers: Bitcoin 🍣 Nigiri

A typical Bitcoin Nigiri

Overview

Bitcoin Nigiri is a cross-platform command line tool that allows to quickly fire up a personal regtest Bitcoin blockchain along with a Liquid sidechain, Electrum explorer and other special developer tools.
You can run tests and execute commands locally for development or in a continuous integration pipeline.

At the moment Docker and Compose are used under the hood to ensure a reproducible installation. Bare metal installations for major platforms are coming.

Get started

  • Download and install nigiri command line interface
$ curl https://getnigiri.vulpem.com | bash
  • Launch Docker daemon (Mac OSX)
$ open -a Docker
  • Close and reopen your terminal, then start Bitcoin and Liquid
$ nigiri start --liquid

That’s it.

Go to http://localhost:5000 for quickly inspect the Bitcoin blockchain or http://localhost:5001 for Liquid.

Commands

Start Bitcoin

nigiri start

Start Bitcoin and Liquid

nigiri start --liquid

Stop

nigiri stop

Delete

nigiri stop --delete

Version

nigiri --version

Log

To see services (node, electrs, esplora, chopsticks) pass as first argument.
Pass an optional flag --liquid for Liquid related services.

nigiri logs SERVICE --liquid

What’s inside?

Data directory

When starting, you can specify a directory where all your container will stay with --datadir flag. By default it will be ~/.nigiri

You can fully configure your own environment, just by tweaking ports and containers via compose and conf files in ~/.nigiri/resources

Bitcoin + Liquid nodes

Bitcoin and Liquid (if selected with —liquid ) rpc interfaces are exposed both with user admin1 and password 123 .

At the moment the nodes are started on regtest network. testnet and mainnet compose files will be released soon.

Electrum & Nigiri Chopstick

For each chain an Electrum server is started and exposes and the rpc interface. We use the Blockstream Electrs fork that and wrap the REST interface with Nigiri Chopstick, an API pass-through that simply proxies requests to Electrs and adds some handy features for a developer sandbox:

  • POST endpoint /faucet to get Bitcoins or Liquid Bitcoin with a application/json body as {"address":"yourBitcoinOrLiquidAddr"}
  • automatic block mining once /tx POST endpoint’s called

Esplora

Quickly inspect the blocks via the browser using the Esplora explorer, deployed for both bitcoin and liquid.

Do you like Nigiri?

Give us a star on GitHub!

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Vulpem Ventures

Enabling the next generation of bitcoin-native financial services