How to use the Steem CLI wallet

This guide will show you step-by-step how to set up a new wallet and make a transfer of Steem Dollars to another account.

In order to use the Steem wallet you need to have the Steem daemon (steemd) running. It will act as window to the blockchain, through which your wallet connects.

If you want to connect to an external Steem daemon you can skip step 2 - 4.1a and jump straight to 4.1b after you've downloaded the wallet.

1. Downloads

I'll cover this step for Windows only but there are many guides on how to set it up on other platforms.

Download Steem Windows Wallet and Miner and Visual C++ Redistributable Packages for Visual Studio 2013 in case you don't already have it installed. Unpack the wallet/miner in a location of your choice.

2. Configure steemd

Start steemd. It should say "No witnesses configured!". Close steemd. It has now placed a config.ini file in witness_node_data_dir.

Open the config file and add the following after # P2P nodes to connect to on startup:

seed-node = 52.38.66.234:2001
seed-node = 52.37.169.52:2001
seed-node = 52.26.78.244:2001
seed-node = 192.99.4.226:2001
seed-node = 46.252.27.1:1337
seed-node = 81.89.101.133:2001
seed-node = 52.4.250.181:39705
seed-node = steemd.pharesim.me:2001
seed-node = seed.steemed.net:2001
seed-node = steem.clawmap.com:2001
seed-node = seed.steemwitness.com:2001
seed-node = steem-seed1.abit-more.com:2001

Also add an RPC endoint after # Endpoint for websocket RPC to listen on:

rpc-endpoint = 127.0.0.1:8090

3. Start steemd

After you've saved the config file start steemd again. It will now sync the blockchain which will take a while. You can speed this up by downloading the blockchain separately (see section Download Wallet).

When steemd starts outputting "Got X transactions..." you know it is up to date and you can start using your wallet.

4. Wallet

4.1a Start wallet for local daemon

Start cli_wallet. You should see something like this:

4.1b Start wallet for external daemon

(skip this step if you did 2 - 4.1a)

It's possible to use the wallet without your own steemd running by connecting to an external Steem daemon. See the following guides:

4.2 Set password

Your fresh wallet needs to have a password before you can start using it. Set a password with the following command:

set_password yourpassword

This is the password to your wallet and has nothing to do with your Steem account yet.

4.3 Unlock wallet

After setting a password your wallet will be locked. Unlock it using the password you provided above:

unlock yourpassword

If successful the first word in the terminal will say unlocked:

4.4 Import keys

You're now ready to link your wallet to your account. For transferring Steem Dollars we need to import your Active private key. It can be retrieved from the Permissions tab on your account page at steemit.com.

import_key PRIVATEKEY

4.5 Check that your account is linked

If you run list_my_accounts you should see your account listed:

4.6 Make a transfer

transfer "lantto" "johanherman" "0.001 SBD" "Transfer from CLI wallet" true

Success!

5. That's it!

For a full list of commands you can use the help command. Remember that certain actions require you to import certain keys. In this guide we only imported the Active key. For a comprehensive post about the different keys please see this article by @pfunk.

Let me know if you have any questions or feedback!