cosmos-sdk/docs/guide/basecoin-tool.md

The Basecoin Tool

In previous tutorials we learned the basics of the basecoin CLI and how to implement a plugin. In this tutorial, we provide more details on using the basecoin tool.

ABCI Server

So far we have run Basecoin and Tendermint in a single process. However, since we use ABCI, we can actually run them in different processes. First, initialize both Basecoin and Tendermint:

basecoin init
tendermint init

In one window, run

basecoin start --without-tendermint

and in another,

tendermint node

You should see Tendermint start making blocks!

Keys and Genesis

In previous tutorials we used basecoin init to initialize ~/.basecoin with the default configuration. This command creates files both for Tendermint and for Basecoin. The Tendermint files are stored in ~/.basecoin/tendermint, and are the same type of files that would exist in ~/.tendermint after running tendermint init. For more information on these files, see the guide to using tendermint.

Now let's make our own custom Basecoin data.

First, create a new directory:

mkdir example-data

We can tell basecoin to use this directory by exporting the BCHOME environment variable:

export BCHOME=$(pwd)/example-data

If you're going to be using multiple terminal windows, make sure to add this variable to your shell startup scripts (eg. ~/.bashrc).

Now, let's create a new private key:

basecoin key new > $BCHOME/key.json

Here's what my `key.json looks like:

{
	"address": "15F591CA434CFCCBDEC1D206F3ED3EBA207BFE7D",
	"priv_key": [
		1,
		"737C629667A9EAADBB8E7CF792D5A8F63AA4BB51E06457DDD7FDCC6D7412AAAD43AA6C88034F9EB8D2717CA4BBFCBA745EFF19B13EFCD6F339EDBAAAFCD2F7B3"
	],
	"pub_key": [
		1,
		"43AA6C88034F9EB8D2717CA4BBFCBA745EFF19B13EFCD6F339EDBAAAFCD2F7B3"
	]
}

Yours will look different - each key is randomly derrived.

Now we can make a genesis.json file and add an account with our public key:

[
  "base/chain_id", "example-chain",
  "base/account", {
    "pub_key": [1, "43AA6C88034F9EB8D2717CA4BBFCBA745EFF19B13EFCD6F339EDBAAAFCD2F7B3"],
    "coins": [
	{
	  "denom": "gold",
	  "amount": 1000000000,
	}
    ]
  }
]

Here we've granted ourselves 1000000000 units of the gold token. Note that we've also set the base/chain_id to be example-chain. All transactions must therefore include the --chain_id example-chain in order to make sure they are valid for this chain. Previously, we didn't need this flag because we were using the default chain ID ("test_chain_id"). Now that we're using a custom chain, we need to specify the chain explicitly on the command line.

Reset

You can reset all blockchain data by running:

basecoin unsafe_reset_all