Exposing RPC interface

If you are developing a service on Obyte and your programming language is node.js, your best option is to just require() the ocore modules that you need.

For exchanges and other custody wallets, there is a specialized JSON RPC service. However it is limited and exposes only those functions that the exchanges need.

If you are developing a service on Obyte and your programming language is node.js, your best option is to just require() the ocore modules that you need (most likely you need headless-obyte and various modules inside ocore). This way, you'll also be running a Obyte node in-process.

If you are programming in another language, or you'd like to run your Obyte node in a separate process, you can still access many of the functions of headless-obyte and ocoreby creating a thin RPC wrapper around the required functions and then calling them via JSON-RPC.

Get started

To get started, we can add RPCify to existing project or directly to headless-obyte with this command:

npm install https://github.com/byteball/rpcify.git

See the documentation about RPCify for more details.

Exposing functions and events

To expose the required functions via JSON-RPC, create a project that has headless-obyte, ocore (and any other ocore modules) and RPCify as dependencies:

var rpcify = require('rpcify');
var eventBus = require('ocore/event_bus.js');

// this is a module whose methods you want to expose via RPC
var headlessWallet = require('headless-obyte'); // when headless-obyte is dependency of your project
//var headlessWallet = require('../start.js'); // when this script is in headless-obyte tools folder
var balances = require('ocore/balances.js'); // another such module

// most of these functions become available only after the passphrase is entered
eventBus.once('headless_wallet_ready', function(){
	// start listening on RPC port
	rpcify.listen(6333, '127.0.0.1');

	// expose some functions via RPC
	rpcify.expose(headlessWallet.issueChangeAddressAndSendPayment);
	rpcify.expose(balances.readBalance, true);
	rpcify.expose(balances.readAllUnspentOutputs);
	rpcify.expose([
		headlessWallet.readFirstAddress,
		headlessWallet.readSingleWallet,
		headlessWallet.issueOrSelectAddressByIndex
	], true);

	// expose some events 
	rpcify.exposeEvent(eventBus, "my_transactions_became_stable");
	rpcify.exposeEvent(eventBus, "new_my_transactions");
});

Calling with HTTP requests

From another Node.js app, calling the function would look something like this:

var rpc    = require('json-rpc2');
var client = rpc.Client.$create(6333, '127.0.0.1');

client.call('issueChangeAddressAndSendPayment', [asset, amount, to_address, device_address], function(err, unit) {
    ...
});

Listening via WebSockets

From another Node.js app, sending function calls and listening to events would look something like this:

var WebSocket = require('ws');
var ws        = new WebSocket("ws://127.0.0.1:6333");

ws.on('open', function onWsOpen() {
	console.log("ws open");
	ws.send(JSON.stringify({
		"jsonrpc":"2.0",
		"id":1,
		"method":"readBalance",
		"params":["LUTKZPUKQJDQMUUZAH4ULED6FSCA2FLI"]
	})); // send a command
});

ws.on('error', function onWsError(e){
	console.log("websocket error"+e);
})

ws.on('message', function onWsMessage(message){ // JSON responses
	console.error(message);
	// {"jsonrpc":"2.0","result":{"base":{"stable":0,"pending":0}},"error":null,"id":1} // response to readBalance
  // {"event":"my_transactions_became_stable","data":[["1pLZa3aVicNLE6vcClG2IvBe+tO0V7kDsxuzQCGlGuQ="]]} // event my_transactions_became_stable
});