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Simple Bitcoin Wallet

This a simple example of a personal Bitcoin wallet, built using the Blocktrail Bitcoin API and Laravel framework.. You can use it to get started on integrating Bitcoin data in your own php applications.

Requirements

On Linux you need to install the following packages:

On Windows you need to enable the following extensions in your php.ini if not already done:

You will also need composer for package management in the backend.

Getting Started

1. Copy the code

First clone this repository and copy the env.example.php to a file called env.php . This contains certain environment specific variables used in the app, including datbase connection settings and API keys.
Now run composer update to download all the required packages.

2. Get your API keys

Go to www.blocktrail.com and sign up for a free API account. Create an API key, and then add this with the corresponding secret to the env.php file.

For email functionality we use Mailgun. Sign up for an api key and then also add these to the env.php file. You can skip this step if you don't want to use the email feature.
(note that the .env.php file has been added to the .gitignore. You should always keep your API details secret)

3. Set up the server

run php artisan serve to quickly setup a nice little local server serve the app. Alternatively you can set up Laravel Homestead, the pre-packaged Vagrant virtual machine that provides you with a quick and easy local web server environment.

4. Run the migrations and seed the database

If you've set up homestead then all the database config is ready for you to run migrations and database seeding. If not, then you need to set up your database and add the details to the env.php. When done you can run php artisan migrate --seed on homestead/locally to create the database tables and run the table seeders.

5. You're good to go

With the server up and running now, simply navigate to http://localhost:8000 (or your homestead server) to see the simple wallet and block explorer at work. A user and initial wallet has been created through the table seeders. You can log in with email: [email protected] password: test.

6. Things to know

For webhooks to be created and used your server needs to be accessible via a public domain. When developing you can achieve this easily through the use of a tunnel. ngrok allows you to easily set up a tunnel between your local environment and an external domain (either controlled by you, or a free subdomain on their domain).
If you set up a tunnel to your local server, go into the env.php file and set the 'APP_URL' setting to be the public URL. You'll need to do this before you run the database seeder, so that the initial wallet and webhook is created with the correct url.

Windows Developers
A note for windows developers: you may encounter an issue in php with cURL and SSL certificates, where cURL is unable to verify a server's cert with a CA ((error 60)[http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/libcurl-errors.html]).
Too often the suggested solution is to disable ssl cert verification in cURL, but this completely defeats the point of using SSL. Instead you should take two very simple steps to solve the issue permanently:

1. download cacert.pem from the curl website. This is a bundle of trusted CA root certs extracted from mozilla.org. Save it in a folder within your php installation.
2. open your php.ini and add/edit the following line (use an absolute path to where you placed the cert bundle):

Need Help?

Get in contact with us at [email protected] and we'll be happy to help you in any way we can.

A tutorial will be coming soon describing the steps to creating this personal Bitcoin wallet with Laravel.