JS Stellar Base

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The stellar-base library is the lowest-level stellar helper library. It consists of classes to read, write, hash, and sign the xdr structures that are used in stellar-core. This is an implementation in JavaScript that can be used on either Node.js or web browsers.

Warning! The Node version of this package uses the sodium-native package, a native implementation of Ed25519 in Node.js, as an optional dependency. This means that if for any reason installation of this package fails, stellar-base will fallback to the much slower implementation contained in tweetnacl.

If you'd explicitly prefer not to install the sodium-native package, pass the appropriate flag to skip optional dependencies when installing this package (e.g. --no-optional if using npm install or --without-optional using yarn install).

If you are using stellar-base in a browser you can ignore this. However, for production backend deployments you should most likely be using sodium-native. If sodium-native is successfully installed and working, StellarBase.FastSigning variable will be equal true. Otherwise it will be false.

Quick start

Using yarn to include js-stellar-base in your own project:

yarn add @stellar/stellar-base

For browsers, use Bower to install it. It exports a variable StellarBase. The example below assumes you have stellar-base.js relative to your html file.

<script src="stellar-base.js"></script>
<script>
  console.log(StellarBase);
</script>

Install

To use as a module in a Node.js project

  1. Install it using yarn:
yarn add @stellar/stellar-base
  1. require/import it in your JavaScript:
var StellarBase = require('@stellar/stellar-base');

To self host for use in the browser

  1. Install it using bower:
bower install stellar-base
  1. Include it in the browser:
<script src="./bower_components/stellar-base/stellar-base.js"></script>
<script>
  console.log(StellarBase);
</script>

If you don't want to use install Bower, you can copy built JS files from the bower-js-stellar-base repo.

To use the cdnjs hosted script in the browser

  1. Instruct the browser to fetch the library from cdnjs, a 3rd party service that hosts js libraries:
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/stellar-base/{version}/stellar-base.js"></script>
<script>
  console.log(StellarBase);
</script>

Note that this method relies using a third party to host the JS library. This may not be entirely secure.

Make sure that you are using the latest version number. They can be found on the releases page in Github.

To develop and test js-stellar-base itself

  1. Install Node 18.x

We support the oldest LTS release of Node, which is currently 18.x. Please likewise install and develop on Node 16 so you don't get surprised when your code works locally but breaks in CI.

If you work on several projects that use different Node versions, you might find helpful to install a NodeJS version manager:

  • https://github.com/creationix/nvm
  • https://github.com/wbyoung/avn
  • https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf
  1. Install Yarn

This project uses Yarn to manages its dependencies. To install Yarn, follow the project instructions available at https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/install.

  1. Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/stellar/js-stellar-base.git
  1. Install dependencies inside js-stellar-base folder
cd js-stellar-base
yarn
  1. Observe the project's code style

While you're making changes, make sure to regularly run the linter to catch any linting errors (in addition to making sure your text editor supports ESLint)

yarn lint

as well as fixing any formatting errors with

yarn fmt

If you're working on a file not in src, limit your code to Node 6.16 ES! See what's supported here: https://node.green/. (Our npm library must support earlier versions of Node, so the tests need to run on those versions.)

Updating XDR definitions

  1. Make sure you have Docker installed and running.
  2. make reset-xdr

Usage

For information on how to use js-stellar-base, take a look at the docs in the docs folder.

Testing

To run all tests:

yarn test

To run a specific set of tests:

yarn test:node
yarn test:browser

Tests are also run automatically in Github Actions for every master commit and pull request.

Documentation

Documentation for this repo lives inside the docs folder.

Contributing

Please see the CONTRIBUTING.md for details on how to contribute to this project.

Publishing to npm

npm version [<newversion> | major | minor | patch | premajor | preminor | prepatch | prerelease]

A new version will be published to npm and Bower by GitHub Actions.

npm >= 2.13.0 required. Read more about npm version.

License

js-stellar-base is licensed under an Apache-2.0 license. See the LICENSE file for details.