Getting Started with CLI

The guide will introduce you to the EthVigil API endpoints with the help of a CLI tool that abstracts away the underlying HTTP requests. By the end of this guide, you shall be able to perform the following without a graphical frontend:

  • sign up using your exclusive EthVigil invite code
  • access your account information on EthVigil
  • deploy a Solidity smart contract through the CLI tool

If you wish to setup the CLI tool later, skip this section of the guide to use the web interface directly ⏩ ⏩ Using the Web Interface

Recommended Installation

Download the Linux or Mac OSX binary. You can unzip from a terminal with the following command. unzip /path/to/ev-cli-<platform>.zip

Most people would keep ev-cli in their primary user folder or set an alias for easy command-line access.

sudo cp /path/to/ethvigil-cli/ev-cli /usr/local/bin/

Advanced Installation (via pip)

# clone the git repo
git clone https://github.com/blockvigil/ethvigil-cli.git
cd ethvigil-cli
pip install -e .

Setting up your account

There are a few handy paths you can take to setup or initialize your account on the EthVigil CLI. Choose one of them from the following as it fits your scenario.

✅ Generate a new EthVigil invite code and complete signup on CLI

Head to EthVigil Beta to generate an invite code. Next you will need to run an init on the CLI tool.

ev-cli init

If you do not have ev-cli in your path and/or calling it directly, you will need to prefix ./

./ev-cli init

On the next prompt you will be asked for your invite code. The invite code should have been sent to the email address you used to register.

Enter your invite code: <invite-code-goes-here>

You should see something like the following

http://beta.ethvigil.com/api/signup
{"success":true,"data":{"status":"active","email":"[email protected]"}}
Sign up succeeded...
Logging in with your credentials...
You have signed up and logged in successfully to EthVigil Beta
---YOU MIGHT WANT TO COPY THESE DETAILS TO A SEPARATE FILE---
===Private key (that signs messages to interact with EthVigil APIs===
0xprivatekeyhexstring
===ETHEREUM hexadecimal address corresponding to above private key===
0xdFaFF6081f4544fEb76d213DEB2f9DC3C8453b6

On EthVigil APIs, you are primarily idenitified by the above 160 bit address that we have generated locally for you. 0xdFaFF6081f4544fEb76d213DEB2f9DC3C8453b6 in this case.

You can import the corresponding private key to a wallet solution like MetaMask.

The keys are locally stored and EthVigil does not have access to them. You can check the ~/.ethvigil/settings.json file once init is complete.

Feel free to skip to the section Get your EthVigil account information if you have completed your account setup following the above instructions.

✅ Reuse your in-browser local wallet settings (No Metamask involved)

If you are already signed up on the Web UI with a local wallet, you can export a settings.json file that can be used to initialize the CLI.

Use the Export Key option from the Settings dropdown to download the settings.json

export EthVigil settings from Web UI screenshot

Next run the following command on your terminal to import these settings

ev-cli importsettings path/to/settings.json

If you do not have ev-cli in your path and/or calling it directly, you will need to prefix ./

./ev-cli importsettings path/to/settings.json

And that's it! Your CLI tool is now ready for further use. The GIF below demonstrates these instructions in action.

Get your EthVigil account information

Once initialized, you can find information related to your EthVigil account through the CLI tool.

ev-cli accountinfo
Contracts events fired to registered hooks: {'usage': 0, 'limit': 1000}
=============
Registered integrations/hooks: {'usage': 1, 'limit': 10}
=============
EthVigil API (secret) key: 80340b2a-633b-4a33-898c-06055ee10a34
=============
EthVigil API (read) key: 0ab4a826-bdda-4910-af33-e7ac8d0f0ec4
=============
REST API prefix: https://beta-api.ethvigil.com/v0.1
=============
Contracts deployed/verified:
=============
Name: SignerControlBase
Address: 0x746254cb1888a0f073fca2cf397457fb3e54396f
--------------------
Name: ERC20Mintable
Address: 0xaec35285e21045bd4f159165015cc1f9df14c13e
--------------------

Deploy a Solidity smart contract

We have included a couple of smart contracts written in Solidity in the Github repo to help you test out their deployment right away. You can find them under contracts/ as ERC20Mintable.sol and SignerControlBase.sol

The syntax to deploy a contract through the CLI tool is:

ev-cli deploy <path-to-solidity-contract> \
--contractName=<contract-name> \
--constructorInputs='JSON representation of the constructor arguments'

Currently EthVigil API accepts Solidity files that import other Solidity files containing smart contracts and library code, within the same directory. For example, your imports must be of the form import './SafeMath.sol' denoting that SafeMath.sol is to be found in the same directory.

We will soon add support for parsing relative import paths as well. Feel free to create a pull request against our Github repo or chat with us on the public discord channel if you wish to contribute to solving this.

ERC20 token contract example - ERC20Mintable.sol

ev-cli deploy contracts/ERC20Mintable.sol --contractName=ERC20Mintable --constructorInputs='["TestTokenName", "SYMB", 18]'
Contract ERC20Mintable deployed successfully
Contract Address: 0xaec35285e21045bd4f159165015cc1f9df14c13e
Deploying tx: 0x17a8009565731f45a1621905a7e85e84a6330b485ac3e7e450d90f126b6c3006

Observe that we are setting --constructorInputs. It is optional for contracts that have no constructor inputs programmed.

If you do not pass the --constructorInputs argument, you shall be prompted for the same.

ev-cli deploy contracts/ERC20Mintable.sol --contractName='ERC20Mintable'
Enter constructor inputs...
name(string): TestToken
symbol(string): TTK
decimals(uint8): 18
Contract ERC20Mintable deployed successfully
Contract Address: 0x9290b03870b0c4c99cc3c1e1dfcfa1ff789af6c0
Deploying tx: 0x699af417f4349f9e29d63dbc894874b5ae865fefe8e7a6bb2365339fab774211

SignerControlBase.sol

This contract forms the base of EthVigil's Proxy+Signer Control contract. Without going into the logic of the contract, let us take a look at the constructor as written in the contract.

constructor (address[] memory _primaryOwners, address[] memory _secondaryOwners, uint _required_confirmations)
public

⚠️Passing JSON serialized constructor inputs to the CLI tool

This section deals with passing constructor inputs via the CLI tool. It is always easier to do the same with code. There can be compounding confusion since

  • individual constructor parameters that are arrays are expected by the EthVigil API to be encoded as strings
  • the CLI tool itself accepts all the inputs as an array string.

An equivalent representation of the constructor inputs in JSON would look like

[
"[\"0x774246187E1E2205C5920898eEde0945016080Df\", \"0x902Abade63A5CB1b503Fe389aEA5906D18DAAF2b\"]",
"[\"0x0228c246170f010C386f49e2dbc7aA999384B399\", \"0x5747Ca27b1031D8054cB9Cbc79F70CD2d9D2E204\"]",
2
]

Example to generate the JSON serialized string with Python follows

$ python
>>> import json
>>> _primary = ["0x774246187E1E2205C5920898eEde0945016080Df", "0x902Abade63A5CB1b503Fe389aEA5906D18DAAF2b"], # primary owners
>>> _secondary = ["0x0228c246170f010C386f49e2dbc7aA999384B399", "0x5747Ca27b1031D8054cB9Cbc79F70CD2d9D2E204"] # secondary owners
>>> inputs = [
json.dumps(_primary), json.dumps(_secondary), 2 # _required_confirmations
]
# write the entire list of arguments as a JSON serialized string into a file
>>> with open('c_inputs', 'w') as f:
json.dump(inputs, f)

We dumped the JSON representation of the entire array of constructor inputs into a file, c_inputs. We shall pass this next to the command line option of --constructorInputs in our call to deploy.

ev-cli deploy SignerControlBase.sol --contractName SignerControlBase --constructorInputs="$(< c_inputs )" --verbose=1
Got constructor inputs:
["[\"0x774246187E1E2205C5920898eEde0945016080Df\", \"0x902Abade63A5CB1b503Fe389aEA5906D18DAAF2b\"]", "[\"0x0228c246170f010C386f49e2dbc7aA999384B399\", \"0x5747Ca27b1031D8054cB9Cbc79F70CD2d9D2E204\"]", 2]
EthVigil deploy response:
{"success":true,"data":{"contract":"0x746254cb1888a0f073fca2cf397457fb3e54396f","gas":"infinite","hash":"0xcb2cb6f036e01eb22707084f4780d731ee959a50fe6b6a562643cfa40f3d5e2f"}}
Contract SignerControlBase deployed successfully
Contract Address: 0x746254cb1888a0f073fca2cf397457fb3e54396f
Deploying tx: 0xcb2cb6f036e01eb22707084f4780d731ee959a50fe6b6a562643cfa40f3d5e2f

Verifying a previously deployed contract

Ethereum is decentralized, and you may have deployed contracts through a different interface, for eg, remix.ethereum.org and would like to operate on them through your current EthVigil account.

For this purpose, you will have to verify and add the contract to your account by specifying a few details, including the contract source code.

To use the feature of verifying and adding contracts to EthVigil, we assume that you have the source code and the address at which the contract has been deployed.

Here we have deployed the Microblog.sol contract found in the CLI example contracts directory, contracts/Microblog.sol through remix.ethereum.org , compiled with the Solidity compiler v0.5.17+commit.d19bba13 and optimization flag off.

Remix IDE solidity compilation parameters

Interactive mode

Run the verify command in interactive mode

ev-cli verifycontract -i

or

ev-cli verifycontract --interactive

Let us go over the input prompts for the interactive mode.

  • Contract address to be verified: 0x797ae7841281b6b3a72496b0193c91d150c7105d

  • Contract name: Microblog

  • Location of Solidity file: contracts/Microblog.sol

Next you will have a paged list of compilers from which you have to choose the integer value against the compiler version which was used to compile the contract on https://remix.ethereum.org.

CLI list of solidity compilers

In our case, the Solidity compiler v0.5.17+commit.d19bba13 is at 27. Press q to exit the list and go back to the input prompt where you can enter this value

The last input is regarding the optimization flag set originally at the time of compiling the deployed contract. Which is off in this case.

If you entered all the values at the prompts correctly, you should see a success message.

Screenshot of verification process

Non-interactive mode (pass CLI arguments)

The same process as described above can be achieved from the command line by passing the right arguments against the parameters.

You can run ev-cli verifycontract --help to learn about all the parameters

ev-cli verifycontract --contractAddress 0x9d885fac1e993529b37fc50415a9c152a3ed5fd4 \
--contractName Microblog \
--compilerVersion 'v0.5.17+commit.d19bba13' \
--optimization false \
--contractFile contracts/Microblog.sol

Non-interactive mode verification

Adding integrations

You can add integrations like webhooks/email notifications/slack notifications on a contract deployed via EthVigil APIs.

  • You can monitor
    • specific/all events being emitted on a contract
    • all transactions taking place on a contract
  • You receive the relevant payloads like event topics or transaction input data

Webhooks

To test webhooks, it is suggested to set up a webhook listener on a service like https://webhook.site

EthVigil supports only HTTPS enabled webhook endpoints

Register the webhook endpoint to get an ID by which the endpoint willl be identified

ev-cli registerhook 0xbbd8cda5503e1df2983f738ad131a2304528e3dd https://webhook.site/9facc063-beb1-483f-b24a-408375e5d1b6
{"success":true,"data":{"id":10}}
Succeeded in registering webhook with Ethvigil API...
EthVigil Hook ID: 10

Subscribe to the Transfer and Approval events on the contract

ev-cli addhooktoevent 0xbbd8cda5503e1df2983f738ad131a2304528e3dd 10 Transfer,Approval
Registering | hook ID: 10 | events: ['Transfer', 'Approval'] | contract: 0xbbd8cda5503e1df2983f738ad131a2304528e3dd
{"success":true}
Succeeded in adding hook

Subscribe to all events, with a wildcard, *

ev-cli addhooktoevent 0xbbd8cda5503e1df2983f738ad131a2304528e3dd 10 '*'
Registering | hook ID: 10 | events: ['*'] | contract: 0xbbd8cda5503e1df2983f738ad131a2304528e3dd
{"success":true}
Succeeded in adding hook

Subscribe to all transactions sent to the contract

ev-cli enabletxmonitor 0xbbd8cda5503e1df2983f738ad131a2304528e3dd 10
{"success":true}
Succeded in adding hook to monitor all contract txs

More CLI features

Dump local settings

ev-cli dumpsettings
{'PRIVATEKEY': '0xprivatekeyhexstring', 'INTERNAL_API_ENDPOINT': 'https://beta.ethvigil.com/api', 'REST_API_ENDPOINT': 'http://localhost:9000/api/v0.1', 'ETHVIGIL_USER_ADDRESS': '0x40b93b89f89c674fB97db61d4b2D9CE2C2Cf6EB6', 'ETHVIGIL_API_KEY': '80340b2a-633b-4a33-898c-06055ee10a34'}

Reset

If you wish to begin with a fresh slate, run the tool with the reset argument.

You will lose all saved state, including the private key used to identify your account on EthVigil. You should either backup the information or request a new invite code

ev-cli reset
Do you want to reset the current EthVigil CLI configuration and state? [y/N]:

Backup settings and recover later

ev-cli dumpsettings > settings-backup.json
ev-cli reset
ev-cli importsettings setting-backup.json
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