Easiest way to control a remote bitcoind instance?

What's the easiest way to control bitcoind running on a remote machine?

I'd like to make transfers, manage my wallet, etc, and ideally I'd like to do it using a UI such as bitcoin-qt. Unfortunately I don't see how to get bitcoin-qt to connect to a remote bitcoind. Is there a different piece of software that can do this?

I know I can use bitcoind itself to send commands to a remote instance, but I'm hoping for UI.

The reason I'm interested is that I'm happy to leave bitcoind running and stay synchronised on one machine, but this is not the same machine that I want to run the UI on.

pauldoo

Posted 2013-04-10T20:37:05.443

Reputation: 257

Till today, I thought that bitcoind and bitcoin-qt accept the same parameters and switches. If you can connect to remote bitcoind via bitcoind, maybe you can also do it with bitcoin-qt? – ripazha – 2013-08-25T15:28:38.343

Answers

Assuming you're using a Linux-based system, Xpra is a great tool for running GUI apps headless and attaching to them on a remote system. Make sure you install a recent version from one of the Winswitch repositories.

I haven't tried the Winswitch front-end since command line usage is so simple. Just do this on your server:

xpra start :7
DISPLAY=:7 bitcoin-qt

And this on the client:

xpra attach ssh:my.server.ip:7

akaihola

Posted 2013-04-10T20:37:05.443

Reputation: 582

1Whooohooo! I have been looking for this kind of X11 tool for years! Thank you so much! I am probably not going to use it for bitcoin, since I am happy with the CLI client there, but this goes for me. Xpra seems perfectly suitable for this. – Paul Hänsch – 2013-10-24T23:03:15.243

1This requires the server to have bitcoin-qt installed, which may be undesirable on a simple Linux box with no GUI libs installed. – Jozef – 2017-06-29T10:40:45.957