Generating and Importing Wallets
In order to follow this Bitcoin programming tutorial with ease, it would be great to always use the same set of addresses, in NodeJS as well as in Bitcoin Core CLI. But we currently can’t simply import a mnemonic or a HD wallet seed into Bitcoin Core.
So we will use the Bitcoin Test Wallets Generator library made by Bitcoin Studio. It allows us to generate six different BIP32 HD wallets (Alice, Bob, Carol, Dave, Eve and Mallory), each containing three distinct ECDSA key pairs. From each public key is derived three Bitcoin addresses for each type of PKH output. The library writes all the keys and addresses in a new wallets.json file. Then the script import all the private keys into Bitcoin Core (make sure the software is launched).
Each bitcoin address is marked by a label such as alice_1, which you can list with the listlabels Bitcoin Core command. If this
command returns an empty array it means that the wallets have not been imported properly.
| Windows users will have issues if the library is not able to execute bash scripts. |
Instructions
After launching Bitcoin Core in regtest mode, run the following commands.
It will generate for you six test wallets, create a wallets.json file and import all private keys into Bitcoin Core.
cd code
npm install
npx bitcointestwalletsBy default the test wallets used in this guide are the same as the default ones in the Bitcoin Test Wallets Generator library. Check the library’s repository if you want to use different wallets.