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Prepare Environment

Setting Environmental Variables

Specify the location of the directory for storing your config and keypair by setting the environmental variable PCHAIN_CLI_HOME.

Always remember the location that you set, if you forget the location, it means you forget where your keypair is being placed.

Tips

For security reasons, you may want to set environmental temporarily, so that after you close the terminal session, it will forget the keypair location.

The following command will set the environmental variable temporarily:

# For example, "/home/user/pchain_cli_home"
export PCHAIN_CLI_HOME="<PATH_TO_DIRECTORY>"

# For example, "C:\Users\user\pchain_cli_home"
$Env:PCHAIN_CLI_HOME="<PATH_TO_DIRECTORY>"

For convenience reasons, you may alternatively want to set environmental permanently. Even in that case, we still suggest you remember the storage location.

The following command will set the environmental variable permanently:

##########################################################
## Append this line to $Home/.bashrc and $Home/.profile ##
##########################################################
export PCHAIN_CLI_HOME="<PATH_TO_DIRECTORY>"

setx PCHAIN_CLI_HOME "<PATH_TO_DIRECTORY>"

Creating Password

For the first time to use pchain_client, you need to create your password for using it. The terminal should prompt you as follows:

First time using ParallelChain Client CLI. Please set up a password to protect your keypairs.
Your password:

This password is only used by the CLI, and NOT associated with the blockchain. It is used for encryption and decryption of your keypairs so that the keypairs are stored in your computer more securely.

Setting Endpoint Interacting with Parallelchain

After installation of pchain_client, you had to update the Mainnet / Testnet endpoint to communicate with the Mainnet / Testnet. 

# Mainnet
./pchain_client config setup --url https://pchain-main-rpc02.parallelchain.io
# Testnet
./pchain_client config setup --url https://pchain-test-rpc02.parallelchain.io

# Mainnet
./pchain_client.exe config setup --url https://pchain-main-rpc02.parallelchain.io
# Testnet
./pchain_client.exe config setup --url https://pchain-test-rpc02.parallelchain.io

This command will write a config.toml file in the folder specified by the environment variable PCHAIN_CLI_HOME. It only needs to be executed once.

Now you can start the journey to play around with pchain_client, but there is still one thing you had to put in mind first.