Create your own private bitcoin testnet

You must have bitcoind and bitcoin-cli installed on your system and in the path unless running this within a Docker container (see below).

This will start up two nodes using the two datadirs 1 and 2. They will only connect to each other in order to remain an isolated private testnet. Two nodes are provided, as one is used to generate blocks and it's balance will be increased as this occurs (imitating a miner). You may want a second node where this behavior is not observed.

Node 1 will listen on port 19000, allowing node 2 to connect to it.

Node 1 will listen on port 19001 and node 2 will listen on port 19011 for the JSON-RPC server.

$ make start

$ make getinfo
bitcoin-cli -datadir=1  getinfo
{
    "version" : 90300,
    "protocolversion" : 70002,
    "walletversion" : 60000,
    "balance" : 0.00000000,
    "blocks" : 0,
    "timeoffset" : 0,
    "connections" : 1,
    "proxy" : "",
    "difficulty" : 0.00000000,
    "testnet" : false,
    "keypoololdest" : 1413617762,
    "keypoolsize" : 101,
    "paytxfee" : 0.00000000,
    "relayfee" : 0.00001000,
    "errors" : ""
}
bitcoin-cli -datadir=2  getinfo
{
    "version" : 90300,
    "protocolversion" : 70002,
    "walletversion" : 60000,
    "balance" : 0.00000000,
    "blocks" : 0,
    "timeoffset" : 0,
    "connections" : 1,
    "proxy" : "",
    "difficulty" : 0.00000000,
    "testnet" : false,
    "keypoololdest" : 1413617762,
    "keypoolsize" : 101,
    "paytxfee" : 0.00000000,
    "relayfee" : 0.00001000,
    "errors" : ""
}

Normally on the live, real, bitcoin network, blocks are generated, on average, every 10 minutes. Since this testnet-in-box uses Bitcoin Core's (bitcoind) regtest mode, we are able to generate a block on a private network instantly using a simple command.

To generate a block:

$ make generate

To generate more than 1 block:

$ make generate BLOCKS=10

To send bitcoins that you've generated:

$ make send ADDRESS=mxwPtt399zVrR62ebkTWL4zbnV1ASdZBQr AMOUNT=10

After sending bitcoins (generated on node 1) to node 2, send them back to node 1. In order to do so you will need to get a new address for node 1. You can optionally specify an account on node 1 to associate the address with.

$ make address ACCOUNT=testwithdrawals

$ make stop

To clean up any files created while running the testnet and restore to the original state:

$ make clean

This testnet-box can be used with Docker to run it in an isolated container.

Pull the image

• docker pull freewil/bitcoin-testnet-box

or build it yourself from this directory

• docker build -t bitcoin-testnet-box .

The docker image will run two bitcoin nodes in the background and is meant to be attached to allow you to type in commands. The image also exposes the two JSON-RPC ports from the nodes if you want to be able to access them from outside the container.

• $ docker run -t -i freewil/bitcoin-testnet-box