13 Feb Ethereum: How can I run an Electrum console command from outside Electrum (in Linux)?

Running Electrum Console Commands from Outside Electrum on Linux

Electrum is a popular Python library for interacting with the Ethereum blockchain. If you have an Electrum console command set up outside of Electrum, you can use it from your Python application to get wallet balances and other information.

Prerequisites:

• You must have Electrum installed on your system.

• You must have created a configuration file (e.g. config.json) to store your Electrum settings. This file should contain the following:

– password: Your Electrum password

– server_url: The URL of your Electrum console command (e.g.

-rpc_version: The RPC version you want to use (default is 4)

• In Python, you need to install thesubprocessmodule, which allows you to create new processes and interact with their output.

Create a file namedconfig.jsonin the same directory as your Electrum console command script (e.g.getbalance.py). This file should contain the following:

{
"password": "YOUR_ELECTRUM_PASSWORD",
"server_url": "
"rpc_version": 4
}

Replace YOUR_ELECTRUM_PASSWORD' with your Electrum password.

Step 2: Install the subprocess module

In Python, you need to install the subprocess module. Run the following command:

pip install subprocess

Step 3: Set up the Electrum Console Command

To set up the Electrum console command, you can use a script or a separate Python process that starts your Electrum wallet and then exits. Here are two examples:

Example 1: Using a separate process

Create a new file named getbalance.sh in the same directory as your Python application:

#!/bin/bash









Set Electrum settings
password="YOUR_ELECTRIUM_PASSWORD"
server_url="

Run Electrum wallet and get balance
getbalance=$(./run-electrum.sh "$password" "$server_url")
echo "Wallet balance: $getbalance"

Create a new file named run-electrum.sh in the same directory:

#!/bin/bash

Set Electrum settings
password="YOUR_ELECTRIUM_PASSWORD"

Run Electrum wallet and get balance balance
getbalance=$(./getbalance.sh "$password")
echo "Wallet balance: $getbalance"

Run run-electrum.sh to start the Electrum process, and then run the Python application:

python getbalance.py

Example 2: Using a single process

Create a new file called getbalance.py with the following content:

import subprocess
password="YOUR_ELECTRUM_PASSWORD"
server_url="

Start the Electrum wallet and get the balance
subprocess.run([./run-electrum.sh", "$password", "$server_url"], check=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
getbalance = subprocess.check_output("getbalance".split(), stdin=subprocess.PIPE).decode()
print("Wallet balance:", getbalance)

Run getbalance.py to start the Electrum process and get the wallet balance:

python getbalance.py

Calling the getbalance() function

To call the getbalance() function outside of Electrum, you can use the following Python code:

import subprocess
password="YOUR_ELECTRUM_PASSWORD"
server_url="

Get the balance using the getbalance function
subprocess.run([./getbalance.sh", "$password", "$server_url"], check=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
balance = subprocess.check_output("getbalance".split(), stdin=subprocess.PIPE).decode()
print (balance)

Replace `YOUR_ELECTRUM_PASSWORDwith your Electrum password.

• You can edit theconfig.json` file to use different settings for the Electrum console command.