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Installing cardano-wallet

Overview#

In this guide, we will show you how to compile and install cardano-wallet into your operating system of choice, directly from the source-code. This component provides a CLI (Command Line Interface) and Web API for creating multiple Cardano wallets, sending transactions, getting transaction history details, wallet balances and more!

note

If you want to avoid compiling the binaries yourself, You can download the latest pre-built binaries of cardano-wallet from the links below.

This guide assumes you have installed cardano-node and cardano-cli into your system. If not you can refer to Installing cardano-node guide for instructions on how to do that.

important

You must connect your cardano-node to the testnet network and make sure it is fully synchronized. If you are not sure how to do that, It is recommended to read Running cardano-node guide before proceeding.

Choose your Platform#

MacOS / Linux#

In this section, we will walk you through the process of downloading, compiling and installing cardano-wallet into your Linux / MacOS based operating system.

Downloading & Compiling#

If you have followed the Installing cardano-node guide, You should have the ~/cardano-src directory. If not, let's create a working directory to store the source-code and build for cardano-wallet.

mkdir -p ~/cardano-srccd ~/cardano-src

Next we download the cardano-wallet source-code: 

git clone https://github.com/input-output-hk/cardano-wallet.gitcd cardano-walletgit fetch --all --recurse-submodules --tags

Switch the repository to the latest tagged commit: 

git checkout tags/v2021-05-26
important

You can check the latest available version / tag by visiting the cardano-wallet Github Release page. At the time of writing this, the current version is v2021-05-26.

Configuring the build options#

We explicitly use the ghc version that we installed earlier. This avoids defaulting to a system version of ghc that might be newer or older than the one you have installed.

cabal configure --with-compiler=ghc-8.10.4

Building and installing the node#

We can now build cardano-wallet code to produce executable binaries.

cabal build all

Install the newly built cardano-wallet binary to the ~/.local/bin directory:

MacOS#
cp -p "dist-newstyle/build/x86_64-osx/ghc-8.10.4/cardano-wallet-2021.5.26/x/cardano-wallet/build/cardano-wallet/cardano-wallet" ~/.local/bin/

Check the version that has been installed:

cardano-wallet version

You should see something like this: 

2021.5.26 (git revision: 7426ccc17ecffcc112abf5e8382bcb89cb24f771)

Congratulations, you have successfully installed cardano-wallet into your Linux system! 🎉🎉🎉

Windows#

important

Currently, the Windows installation guide is still in-progress. In the meantime we recommend using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) to get a Linux environment on-top of Windows. Once you have that installed you can use the Linux guide to install and run cardano-node within WSL.