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w3name

Content addressing for a dynamic web. Now available from the command line!

About

The w3name-cli binary crate provides a command-line tool called w3name, which can be used to interact with the w3name service.

For more about w3name in general, see the main github repository.

Install

Binary CLI releases

To download a pre-compiled binary of the w3name command-line tool, grab the .tar.gz file for your platform from the latest release.

Using cargo install

Make sure to read the Native dependencies section below!

cargo install w3name-cli

Native dependencies

To install with cargo, you'll need the Protocol Buffers compiler, and the protoc command must be on your $PATH. Version 3.20.2 is known to work, and other 3.x versions are likely to work as well.

If you can't install protoc, but you do have cmake, you can set the protoc-src feature, which will build the protobuf compiler from source at build time.

You'll also need perl, since we build openssl from source, and perl is required by the build process.

Using the w3name command-line tool

The w3name command line tool has commands for creating a new name keypair, publishing values, and retrieving the latest value for a name.

You can get an overview with w3name help:

w3name 0.1.0
A tool for creating verifiable names in a web3 world

USAGE:
    w3name <SUBCOMMAND>

OPTIONS:
    -h, --help       Print help information
    -V, --version    Print version information

SUBCOMMANDS:
    create     Create a new public/private keypair and save it to disk
    help       Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)
    publish    Publish a new value for a name, signed with the name's private key
    resolve    Lookup the current value for a name record

Each of the subcommands has it's own help text available using w3name help <command> or w3name <command> --help, for example:

w3name help create

w3name-create 
Create a new public/private keypair and save it to disk

USAGE:
    w3name create [OPTIONS]

OPTIONS:
    -h, --help
            Print help information

    -o, --output <OUTPUT>
            Filename to write the key to.
            
            If not given, will write to a file named `<name>.key`, where `<name>` is the string form
            of the public key.

Resolving the value of a name

To lookup the current value for a name record, use w3name resolve <name>, where <name> is string name identifier.

For example:

w3name resolve k51qzi5uqu5dka3tmn6ipgsrq1u2bkuowdwlqcw0vibledypt1y9y5i8v8xwvu

hello from w3name-rust-client!

Creating a new keypair

Before you can publish name records, you need to create a keypair using w3name create.

With no arguments, it will create a file named <name>.key in the current directory, where <name> is the string form of the public key.

w3name create

wrote new keypair to k51qzi5uqu5dhm3u68li82fpf3952az41aqs0k3opk0wtjyevfud1ohv2qkyrc.key

If you want, you can pass the --output flag to control the output filename:

w3name create --output foo.key

wrote new keypair to foo.key

Publishing values

Once you have a key file, you can publish values with w3name publish:

w3name publish --key your-key-file.key --value "A shiny new value"

published new value for key k51qzi5uqu5dka3tmn6ipgsrq1u2bkuowdwlqcw0vibledypt1y9y5i8v8xwvu: A shiny new value