The following are some notes on getting an Ethereum Wallet running on OSX to talk to an previously running geth instance.
If you start your experimenting with Ethereum on a Mac you'll most likely begin by downloading the Ethereum Wallet. This application will install geth locally and automatically start an instance of it and know how to communicate with it automatically. In addition there is a menu option to switch between running geth against the public chain as well as the –testnet chain.
At some point if you are developing an application or more of a command-line person you'll start running geth manually from the command line to keep your chain up to date or to rebuild it. At this point you may want to know how to start the Ethereum wallet to connect with an existing geth session rather than complain when you start the wallet and it notices a previous geth instance and then refuses to start.
Here are the details for OSX. The idea is similar for other operating systems. In short you want to pass the geth.ipc filename and location to the Wallet so it can communicate with the existing geth session.
Continue reading →The notes over on Ethereum.org when talking about installing geth on a Linux box give instructions using apt-get. Here I have a Centos box and needed an alternative method.
If found that building from source worked just fine using the following steps.
$ sudo yum install golang
$ sudo yum install gmp-devel
$ git clone https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum
$ cd go-ethereum/
$ make geth
$ ls -al build/bin/geth
If you are running geth on OSX and you need to upgrade to the latest version here are the simple steps to follow:
$ https://github.com/ethereum/homebrew-ethereum
$ brew update
$ brew upgrade ethereum
blucas.home:~/Library/Ethereum$ brew upgrade ethereum
==> Upgrading 1 outdated package, with result:
ethereum/ethereum/ethereum 1.6.7
==> Upgrading ethereum/ethereum/ethereum
While developing for Ethereum and using the testnet you'll need Ether to get things done. You can mine for it of course but there are sites called faucets that will send you Eth for free.
I found the following one today and used it a few times to get my balance in shape to do some testing.
Throttled Testnet Faucet
Continue reading →Returning to some Ethereum work I wanted to reset my old local blockchain by deleting it an starting from scratch. Here are notes to describe what to do.
On OSX Ethereum installs in $HOME/Library/Ethereum. The public data is in geth while the testnet directory contains the testnet data.