Creating accounts

Creating accounts

Creating a new account

geth account new

Creates a new account and prints the address.

On the console, use:

> admin.newAccount()

The account is saved in encrypted format, you are prompted for a passphrase. You must remember this passphrase to unlock your account in the future.

For non-interactive use the passphrase can be specified with the --password flag:

geth --password <passwordfile> account new

Note, this is meant to be used for testing only, it is a bad idea to save your password to file or expose in any other way.

Creating an account by importing an EC private key (binary)

import [arguments...]


    geth account import <keyfile>

Imports an unencrypted private key from <keyfile> and creates a new account and prints the address.

The keyfile is assumed to contain an unencrypted private key as canonical EC raw bytes encoded into hex.

The account is saved in encrypted format, you are prompted for a passphrase.

You must remember this passphrase to unlock your account in the future.

For non-interactive use the passphrase can be specified with the -password flag:

geth --password <passwordfile> account import <keyfile>

Note: As you can directly copy your encrypted accounts to another ethereum instance, this import mechanism is not needed when you transfer an account between nodes.

Note: Since you can directly copy your encrypted accounts to another ethereum instance, this import/export mechanism is not needed when you transfer an account between nodes.

Warning: If you use the password flag with a password file, best to make sure the file is not readable or even listable for anyone but you. You achieve this with:

touch /path/to/password 
chmod 700 /path/to/password
cat > /path/to/password
>I type my pass here^D