This is a Nodejs wrapper for sentient-network. Use it in your apps to easily interact with the sentient-netowrk via function calls instead of manual http requests.

It was originally forked from Sia's Nodejs-Sia library.

Prerequisites

• node & npm (version 5.9.0+ recommended)

Installation

npm install sentient.js

Local Development

You can specify a local path for this library in the importing package.json file like so:

{
  // ...
  "dependencies": {
    // ...
    "sentient.js": "file:../nodejs-sentient"
  }
}

Just make sure not to commit this change as it will break for other users and in CI.

You must run npm install before using this library.

Example Usage

import { connect } from 'sentient.js'

// Using promises...
// connect to an already running Sia daemon on localhost:9910 and print its version
connect('localhost:9910')
  .then((sentientd) => {
    sentientd.call('/daemon/version').then((version) => console.log(version))
  })
  .catch((err) => {
    console.error(err)
  })

// Or ES7 async/await
async function getVersion() {
  try {
    const sentientd = await connect('localhost:9910')
    const version = await sentientd.call('/daemon/version')
    console.log('Sentientd has version: ' + version)
  } catch (e) {
    console.error(e)
  }
}

You can also forgo using connect and use call directly by providing an API address as the first parameter:

import { call } from 'sentient.js'

async function getVersion(address) {
  try {
    const version = await call(address, '/daemon/version')
    return version
  } catch (e) {
    console.error('error getting ' + address + ' version: ' + e.toString())
  }
}

console.log(getVersion('10.0.0.1:9910'))

sentient.js can also launch a sentientd instance given a path on disk to the sentientd binary. launch takes an object defining the flags to use as its second argument, and returns the child_process object. You are responsible for keeping track of the state of this child_process object, and catching any errors launch may throw.

import { launch } from 'sentient.js'

try {
  // Flags are passed in as an object in the second argument to `launch`.
  // if no flags are passed, the default flags will be used.
  const sentientdProcess = launch('/path/to/your/sentientd', {
    'modules': 'cghmrtw',
    'profile': true,
  })
  // sentientdProcess is a ChildProcess class.  See https://nodejs.org/api/child_process.html#child_process_class_childprocess for more information on what you can do with it.
  sentientdProcess.on('error', (err) => console.log('sentientd encountered an error ' + err))
} catch (e) {
  console.error('error launching sentientd: ' + e.toString())
}

The call object passed as the first argument into call() are funneled directly into the request library, so checkout their options to see how to access the full functionality of Sia's API

Sentientd.call({
  url: '/consensus/block',
  method: 'GET',
  qs: {
    height: 0
  }
})

Should log something like:

null { block:
 { parentid: '0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000',
   nonce: [ 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 ],
   timestamp: 1433600000,
   minerpayouts: null,
   transactions: [ [Object] ] } }