Using cardano-node installed by Daedalus as CLI?

Question

I want to do some transaction with custom metadata and was wondering if I have to install another instance of cardano-node or if it's possible to use the already installed version by Daedalus.

Answer 1

Yes, it is possible.

First, you need to install cardano-cli binary (you can find it in the Hydra build system, depending on your OS which might be Linux, Windows or Mac OS.

After you have your cardano-cli installed, you now need to set your CARDANO_NODE_SOCKET_PATH environmental variable to the location of your cardano-node socket file that is being run by Daedalus.

This code snippet will do just that, extract the path to the socket file from the cardano-wallet instance.

Depending on the network, you will execute the following for testnet:

export CARDANO_NODE_SOCKET_PATH=$(ps ax | grep -v grep | grep cardano-wallet | grep testnet | sed -r 's/(.*)node-socket //')

# Check var it must be path for file of node socket and not empty
echo $CARDANO_NODE_SOCKET_PATH

Or the following for mainnet:

# Create var CARDANO_NODE_SOCKET_PATH
export CARDANO_NODE_SOCKET_PATH=$(ps ax | grep -v grep | grep cardano-wallet | grep mainnet | sed -r 's/(.*)node-socket //')

# Check var it must be path for file of node socket and not empty
echo $CARDANO_NODE_SOCKET_PATH

After you have done that, you can now try to query the network using your cardano-cli, for testnet:

$ cardano-cli get-tip --testnet-magic 1097911063

Or for mainnet:

$ cardano-cli get-tip --mainnet

Source: this useful gist