Set up Cardano CLI in the Frankenwallet

Confirm you’re OK using an official, pre-built package

Many operators will be accustomed to building their own software, but there are security challenges in maintaining a suitable build environment without routine Internet access, for both:

  • getting & updating the software to build
  • getting & installing dependencies (for both building & running the software)

Therefore our recommendation is to download the official, pre-built cardano-node Releases as they become available, according to the guidelines on this page.

If there is sufficient demand & justification, these instructions will be extended with a procedure (based on Cardano Developer Portal > Getting cardano-node) to build the Cardano CLI (and Node) in the Frankenwallet itself… the original Frankenwallet instructions included this, before the official release packages for Linux became prompt & reliable.

Preparation on host computer

➤ Make a subfolder of your host folder called e.g. pool-bin.

➤ Go to the page for the most recent of the cardano-node Releases tagged Latest.

➤ Go to its Assets section and download the package ending linux.tar.gz (if it’s not there yet, wait a day or so and/or post to the Cardano Forum or developer Discord and ask why).

➤ Extract the cardano-cli file from that archive (generally in the bin subdirectory).

➤ Rename it to the current version; e.g. for version 10.3.1:

mv cardano-cli cardano-cli-10.3.1

… and move it into the subfolder (e.g. pool-bin) that you created earlier. (You can delete the rest of the downloaded files.)

➤ Link the latest Cardano CLI binary to cardano-cli:

Since you will likely be doing this again when future versions come out, keeping cardano-cli as a symbolic link to the latest version will allow you to easily backtrack (without Internet access!) if something goes wrong with a newer version in the Frankenwallet.

In your pool-bin subdirectory, e.g.: for version 10.3.1:

rm cardano-cli     # if that link exists
ln -s cardano-cli-10.3.1 cardano-cli

Move CLI binary to the Frankenwallet

Upon your next boot into the Frankenwallet, you’ll be able to move the current version into a place where it will be called with every executed cardano-cli command and from any operator scripts that you install:

➤ Make a subfolder of your Frankenwallet home directory called /bin.

➤ Copy everything from the subdirectory you created your host folder there (including the symbolic link for cardano-cli… or recreate it).

Since ~/bin is included in the default Ubuntu path, the next time you start a Terminal you can verify that cardano-cli is available:

cardano-cli --version

This version is currently likely to be greater than — in fact, in a different sequence of numbers from — the version number of the cardano-node package you downloaded & named the file with. This is a consequence of the maintainers’ release process.

tip

Therefore, if you want to ensure you’re running the version you just installed, you can compare the first 7 hex digits of the git revision to ensure they match.

e.g. for the current release page at the time of this writing, version 10.3.1 shows b3f237b in the web page header, which will match in the Frankenwallet:

$ ./cardano-cli-10.3.1 --version
cardano-cli 10.7.0.0 - linux-x86_64 - ghc-9.6
git rev b3f237b75e64f4d8142af95b053e2828221d707f