MultiChain Web Demo

MultiChain Web Demo is a simple web interface for MultiChain blockchains, written in PHP.

https://github.com/MultiChain/multichain-web-demo

Copyright(C) 2015,2016 by Coin Sciences Ltd.
License: GNU Affero General Public License, see the file LICENSE.txt.

Welcome to MultiChain Web Demo

This software uses PHP to provide a web front-end for a MultiChain blockchain node.

It currently supports the following features:

• Viewing the node's overall status.
• Creating addresses and giving them real names (names are visible to all nodes).
• Changing permissions for addresses.
• Issuing assets, including custom fields and uploading a file.
• Updating assets, including issuing more units and updating custom fields and file.
• Viewing issued assets, including the full history of fields and files.
• Sending assets from one address to another.
• Creating, decoding and accepting offers for exchanges of assets.
• Creating streams.
• Publishing items to streams, either as text or an uploaded file.
• Viewing stream items, including listing by key or publisher and downloading files.

The web demo does not yet support the following important functionality in the MultiChain API:

• Multisignature addresses and transactions.
• Adding metadata (or stream items) to permissions or asset transactions.
• Viewing an addresses' transactions.
• Subscribing to assets and viewing their transactions.
• Viewing a list of keys or publishers in a stream.
• Peer-to-peer node management.
• Message signing and verification.

The MultiChain Web Demo is still under development, so please contact us if any of these things are crucial for your needs.

System Requirements

• A computer running web server software such as Apache.
• PHP 5.x or later with the curl extension.
• MultiChain 1.0 alpha 26 or later.

Note that this Web Demo does not yet support MultiChain 2.0 preview releases.

Create and launch a MultiChain Blockchain

If you do not yet have a chain to work with, Download MultiChain to install MultiChain and create a chain named chain1 as follows:

multichain-util create chain1
multichaind chain1 -daemon

If your web server is running on the same computer as multichaind, you can skip the rest of this section. Otherwise:

multichain-cli chain1 stop

Then add this to ~/.multichain/chain1/multichain.conf:

rpcallowip=[IP address of your web server]

Then start MultiChain again:

multichaind chain1 -daemon

Configure the Web Demo

This section assumes your blockchain is named chain1 and you are running the node and web server on a Unix variant such as Linux. If not, please substitute accordingly.

Make your life easy for the next step by running these on the node's server:

cat ~/.multichain/chain1/multichain.conf
grep rpc-port ~/.multichain/chain1/params.dat

In the web demo directory, copy the config-example.txt file to config.txt:

cp config-example.txt config.txt

In the demo website directory, enter chain details in config.txt e.g.:

default.name=Default                # name to display in the web interface
default.rpchost=127.0.0.1           # IP address of MultiChain node
default.rpcport=12345               # usually default-rpc-port from params.dat
default.rpcuser=multichainrpc       # username for RPC from multichain.conf
default.rpcpassword=mnBh8aHp4mun... # password for RPC from multichain.conf

Multiple chains are supported by the web demo by copying the same section again but with different prefixes before the period, for example:

another.name=...
another.rpchost=...
...

Note that the config.txt file is readable by users of your web demo installation, and contains your MultiChain API password, so you should never use this basic setup for a production system.

Launch the Web Demo

No additional configuration or setup is required. Based on where you installed the web demo, open the appropriate address in your web browser, and you are ready to go!