leohchen / btcdeb

Bitcoin Script Debugger

btcdeb

Bitcoin Script debugging utilities.

This is a set of tools used to debug or construct scripts for use in Bitcoin.

Preparation

Mac users need the macOS command line tools:

xcode-select --install

And Homebrew.

Dependencies

btcdeb depends on the following:

• libtool
• libssl
• autoconf
• pkg-config

Ubuntu/debian users can do: apt-get install libtool libssl-dev autoconf (with sudo prepended if necessary)

Mac users can do: brew install libtool autoconf pkg-config

Installation

On linux or mac, grab the source code and do:

$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

If any of those give an error, please file an issue and I'll take a look. It could be a dependency that I forgot about.

Emscripten

You can compile btcdeb tools into JavaScript using emscripten.

After installing the SDK, compile btcdeb tools with the following commands:

$ make clean
$ emconfigure ./configure
$ emmake make
$ for i in btcdeb btcc tap; do mv $i $i.bc && emcc -O2 $i.bc libbitcoin.a -o $i.js; done

and then instead of doing ./btcdeb you do node btcdeb.js (or mastify.js, etc).

The last part is done because emscripten's emcc expects the input bytecode file to have the .bc extension, whereas the makefile generates files with no extension.

Note: most things work, but the console in btcdeb does not. You can work around this by doing echo -n -e "step\n\n\n" (with sufficient \ns).

Script debugger

The btcdeb command can step through a Bitcoin Script and show stack content and operations on a per op level. See doc/btcdeb.md for details on usage.

Script compiler

The btcc command can interpret a script in its human readable form and will return a corresponding Bitcoin Script.

$ btcc OP_DUP OP_HASH160 897c81ac37ae36f7bc5b91356cfb0138bfacb3c1 OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG
76a914897c81ac37ae36f7bc5b91356cfb0138bfacb3c188ac

The above is the script pub key for a transaction in Bitcoin in human readable format turned into its hexadecimal representation.