Welcome to bitcoinj

The bitcoinj library is a Java implementation of the Bitcoin protocol, which allows it to maintain a wallet and send/receive transactions without needing a local copy of Bitcoin Core. It comes with full documentation and some example apps showing how to use it.

Technologies

• Java 7 for the core modules, Java 8 for everything else
• Gradle 3.4+ - for building the project
• Google Protocol Buffers - for use with serialization and hardware communications

Getting started

To get started, it is best to have the latest JDK and Gradle installed. The HEAD of the master branch contains the latest development code and various production releases are provided on feature branches.

Building from the command line

To perform a full build use

gradle clean build

You can also run

gradle javadoc

to generate the JavaDocs.

The outputs are under the build directory.

Building from an IDE

Alternatively, just import the project using your IDE. IntelliJ has Gradle integration built-in and has a free Community Edition. Simply use File | New | Project from Existing Sources and locate the build.gradle in the root of the cloned project source tree.

Example applications

These are found in the examples module.

Where next?

Now you are ready to follow the tutorial.

Testing a SNAPSHOT build

Building apps with official releases of bitcoinj is covered in the tutorial.

If you want to develop or test your app with a Jitpack-powered build of the latest master or release-0.15 branch of bitcoinj follow the dynamically-generated instructions for that branch by following the correct link.

• master branch
• release-0.15 branch