docs/src/pages/stacks-blockchain/managing-accounts.md

title	description	icon	duration	experience	tags	images
Managing accounts	Learn how to generate and review accounts	TestnetIcon	15 minutes	beginners	[tutorial]	[{large /images/pages/testnet.svg} {sm /images/pages/testnet-sm.svg}]

Introduction

This tutorial will walk you through the following steps:

• Generating an account
• Reviewing account info
• Reviewing account history
• Getting account balances

-> This tutorial is NodeJS-specific. If you would like to understand how to manage Stacks 2.0 accounts using a different language/framework, please review the accounts guide.

Requirements

You will need NodeJS 8.12.0 or higher to complete this tutorial. You can verify your installation by opening up your terminal and run the following command:

node --version

Step 1: Installing libraries

First, install all the required libraries:

npm install --save @blockstack/stacks-transactions@0.6.0 @stacks/blockchain-api-client cross-fetch

-> The API client is generated from the OpenAPI specification (openapi-generator). Many other languages and frameworks are be supported by the generator.

Step 2: Generating an account

To get started, let's generate a new, random Stacks 2.0 private key:

import fetch from 'cross-fetch';
const {
  makeRandomPrivKey,
  privateKeyToString,
  getAddressFromPrivateKey,
  TransactionVersion,
} = require('@blockstack/stacks-transactions');
const { AccountsApi, FaucetsApi, Configuration } = require('@stacks/blockchain-api-client');

const apiConfig = new Configuration({
  fetchApi: fetch,
  basePath: 'https://stacks-node-api.blockstack.org',
});

const privateKey = makeRandomPrivKey();

-> Note: The code above also imports methods required for the next steps, including API configuration for the client library usage.

Step 3: Reviewing account info

With the private key, you can review account details. First, we need to derive the Stacks address from the private key. Then, we can use the AccountsApi class to get the account details:

const stacksAddress = getAddressFromPrivateKey(
  privateKeyToString(privateKey),
  TransactionVersion.Testnet // remove for Mainnet addresses
);

...

  const accounts = new AccountsApi(apiConfig);

  const accountInfo = await accounts.getAccountInfo({
    principal: stacksAddress
  });

  console.log(accountInfo);

-> Note: A "principal" is any entity that can have a token balance. Find more details in the Principals guide.

The API will respond with a balance, nonce (starting at zero), and respective proofs:

{
  balance: '0x00000000000000000000000000000000',
  nonce: 0,
  balance_proof: '',
  nonce_proof: ''
}

The balance property represents the Stacks token balance, as hex-encoded string of an unsigned 128-bit integer (big-endian). It is not easy to consume the balance property in this format. To simplify that, and to obtain all balances for all tokens (Stacks/STX, fungible, and non-fungible), check out step 5.

Disabling proofs

Proofs, provided as hex-encoded strings, can be removed from the responses by setting the proof parameter:

const accountInfo = await accounts.getAccountInfo({
  principal: stacksAddress,
  proof: 0,
});

Step 4: Reviewing account history

The following step make requires associated accounts transactions. For simplicity, let's run the faucet for the new account:

const faucets = new FaucetsApi(apiConfig);

const faucetTx = await faucets.runFaucetStx({
  address: stacksAddress,
});

console.log(faucetTx);

The API will respond with a new transaction ID and confirmation that the faucet run was successful:

{
  success: true,
  txId: '0x5b3d9b47c8f0a3c161868c37d94977b3b0a507558a542fd9499b597bfc799d11',
  txRaw: '80800000000400164247d6f2b425ac5771423ae6c80c754f717...'
}

-> Note: Wait a few minutes for the transaction to complete. You can review the status using the Explorer, by navigating to the following URL: https://testnet-explorer.blockstack.org/txid/<txid>.

Assuming the faucet transaction was successfully processed, you can review the account history. We are expecting at least one transactions to show up in the account history.

const history = await accounts.getAccountTransactions({
  principal: stacksAddress,
});

console.log(history);

The API will respond with a paginatable list of transactions associated with the account:

{
  limit: 20,
  offset: 0,
  total: 1,
  results: [
    {
      tx_id: '0x89ee63c0',
      tx_type: 'token_transfer',
      fee_rate: '180',
      sender_address: 'STB44HYPYAT2BB2QE513NSP81HTMYWBJP02HPGK6',
      sponsored: false,
      post_condition_mode: 'deny',
      tx_status: 'success',
      block_hash: '0x167662a4e',
      block_height: 2951,
      burn_block_time: 1598910912,
      burn_block_time_iso: '2020-08-31T21:55:12.000Z',
      canonical: true,
      tx_index: 1,
      tx_result: {"hex":"0x03","repr":"true"},
      token_transfer: {
        recipient_address:"STW617CAFYNFQG6G470DNWW4V56XAY7125S3Z6RK",
        amount:"500000",
        memo:"0x466175636574000000"
        },
      events: [{ ... }]
    }
  ]
}

Please review the API reference for property definitions and details.

Handling pagination

To make API responses more compact, lists returned by the API are paginated. For lists, the response body includes:

Parameter	Description	Default
limit	The number of list items returned	20
offset	The number of elements skipped	0
total	The number of all available list items	0
results	Array of list items (length of array equals the set limit)	[]

In order to paginate throughout the full result set, we can use the limit and offset request properties. Here is an example where we request transactions 50-100 for an account:

const history = await accounts.getAccountTransactions({
  principal: stacksAddress,
  limit: 50,
  offset: 50,
});

Step 5: Getting account balances

As mentioned above, any Stacks address can have a variety of tokens and associated balances. In order to get balances for all Stacks, fungible, and non-fungible tokens, we can use the getAccountBalance method:

const balances = await accounts.getAccountBalance({
  principal: stacksAddress,
});

console.log(balances);

The API will respond with the following breakdown of token balances:

{
  stx: {
    balance: '500000',
    total_sent: '0',
    total_received: '500000'
  },
  fungible_tokens: {},
  non_fungible_tokens: {}
}

-> Note: The balance field does not represent full Stacks (STX) token, but micro-STX. 1,000,000 micro-STX are worth 1 Stacks (STX) token.

We can see that the current Stacks (STX) balance is 500000 micro-STX, or 0.5 Stacks (STX) token.