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Testnet - Communicating With Tezos

JSON/RPC interface


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So far we have used the testnet script to execute tezos-client commands. This client communicates with the tezos-node.

Communication works with the help of the JSON/RPC interface. The tezos-node responses are JSON based. Notice it is not the JSON-RPC protocol, the communication is done over HTTP protocol.

Let us first list what the RPC offers:

$ ./hangzhounet.sh client rpc list

This should list you the GET/POST queries you can do.

Analogous to the previous section we want to get the balance first.

First, we need to see all the addresses in our wallet:

$ ./hangzhounet.sh client list known addresses

Look for myFirstKey from the last section and use its address to get the balance, replace the MYFIRSTKEY_ADDRESS string in the following command with it:

$ ./hangzhounet.sh client rpc get /chains/main/blocks/head/context/contracts/MYFIRSTKEY_ADDRESS/balance

Now you should see the balance. But where is the JSON we are talking about? Let us add a flag and use the command again:

$ ./hangzhounet.sh client -l rpc get /chains/main/blocks/head/context/contracts/MYFIRSTKEY_ADDRESS/balance

This time you should see the HTTP requests and the JSON responses the client does.

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You can find the reference for the JSON/RPC interface at the Tezos Developer Resource Documentation.

We can use the flag -l for all commands from the previous section. So, if you run the command:

$ ./hangzhounet.sh client transfer 1 from faucetWallet to myFirstKey --burn-cap 0.5

From the last section, you will see all the queries and responses traveling in the background.

We can also use curl for a request if you start the network and with an exposed RPC port:

./hangzhounet.sh start --rpc-port 8732

Let us request the balance again:

curl -s localhost:8732/chains/main/blocks/head/context/contracts/MYFIRSTKEY_ADDRESS/balance
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We could continue endlessly listing how different requests and their responses look. For the interested reader, we recommend checking out the full description.

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