pictl

pictl

pictl is a command line tool that allows you to interact with the politeiawww API and has been configured to be a pi (Decred's proposal system) client.

Available Commands

You can view the available commands and application options by using the help flag.

$ pictl -h 

You can view details about a specific command by using the help command.

$ pictl help <command>

Persisting Data Between Commands

pictl stores user identity data (the user's public/private key pair), session cookies, and CSRF tokens in the pictl directory. This allows you to login with a user and use the same session data for subsequent commands. The data is segmented by host, allowing you to login and interact with multiple hosts simultaneously.

The location of the pictl directory varies based on your operating system.

macOS

/Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Pictl

Windows

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Pictl

Ubuntu

~/.pictl

Setup Configuration File

pictl has a configuration file that you can setup to make execution easier. You should create the configuration file under the following paths.

macOS

/Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Pictl/pictl.conf

Windows

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Pictl/pictl.conf

Ubuntu

~/.pictl/pictl.conf

If you're developing locally, you'll want to set the politeiawww host in the configuration file to your local politeiawww instance. The host defaults to https://proposals.decred.org. Copy these lines into your pictl.conf file. skipverify is used to skip TLS certificate verification and should only be used when running politeia locally.

host=https://127.0.0.1:4443
skipverify=true

Example Usage

Create a new user

$ pictl usernew email@example.com username password --verify --paywall

--verify and --paywall are options that can be used when running politeiawww on testnet to make the user registration process quicker.

--verify will satisfy the email verification requirement for the user.

--paywall will use the Decred testnet faucet to satisfy the user registration fee requirement.

If you use the --paywall flag, you will still need to wait for block confirmations before you'll be allowed to submit proposals.

Login with the user

$ pictl login email@example.com password

Assign admin privileges and create proposal credits

Proposal credits are required in order to submit a proposal. They are a spam prevention measure that would normally need to be purchased using DCR, but if you're running politeiawww locally, you can use the politeiawww_dbutil tool to add proposal credits to your account. You'll also need to give your user admin privileges if you want to be able make proposals public and to start the proposal vote.

You need to stop politeiawww in order to run these commands. You'll get a resource temporarily unavailable error if you don't.

$ politeiawww_dbutil -testnet -setadmin username true
$ politeiawww_dbutil -testnet -addcredits username 50

Start politeiawww back up.

Submit a new proposal

When submitting a proposal, you can either specify a markdown file or you can use the --random flag to have pictl generate a random proposal for you.

$ pictl proposalnew --random
{
  "files": [
    {
      "name": "index.md",
      "mime": "text/plain; charset=utf-8",
      "digest": "2a72cd797f164489f18628a84b81604d91cb3dd9e8217e3f12c6ba37ab6b7760",
      "payload": "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"
    }
  ],
  "metadata": [
    {
      "hint": "proposalmetadata",
      "digest": "cd7e75c3df810965c48c3c03a47062a1f5bf7e4458b036380877d3c59e331b41",
      "payload": "eyJuYW1lIjoiMjI1ZDJiZTFiYWQ2ZWU0MiJ9"
    }
  ],
  "publickey": "72a1a0f19d6d76b9bbec069f5672fa9f22485961b1dffe8c570558e88168076a",
  "signature": "981711bbf6cf408859f5eeab71bc5ec5a3fb4a723d3c853ede20415c9a5db1f2fd53265f73d79389e54b3ef5e0e924d0b48dee5b380c90ed093a3adcd7dab708"
}
{
  "timestamp": 1602104519,
  "censorshiprecord": {
    "token": "98daf0732ac3006c0000",
    "merkle": "928b9cede1846ba542a81d9a7968baff2b7f7cc4d80f52957746be8f6c3869de",
    "signature": "e30fc5332197f7b8f8fb8f73228a79295c7328d75aff10c123eb00d18e29fbd1a3fb96839f738c1ba19169246b018be389b8898afa1f4466b11a69c036187407"
  }
}

Proposals are identified by their censorship record token in all other commands. The censorship record token of the proposal example shown above is 98daf0732ac3006c0000.

Make a proposal public (admin privileges required)

The proposal must first be vetted by an admin and have the proposal status set to public before it will be publicly viewable.

$ pictl proposalsetstatus [token] public

Now that the proposal status has been made public, any user can comment on the proposal. Once the proposal author feels the discussion period was sufficient, they can authorize the voting period to start.

Authorize the voting period on a proposal (must be author)

Before an admin can start the voting period on a proposal the author must authorize the vote.

$ pictl voteauthorize [token]

Start a proposal vote (admin privileges required)

Once a proposal vote has been authorized by the author, an admin can start the voting period at any point.

$ pictl votestart [token]

Voting on a proposal

Voting on a proposal can be done using either pictl or politeiavoter. pictl is for development uses only. politeiavoter should be used when voting on production proposals.

politeiavoter

See the politeiavoter documentation for more information on using politeiavoter.

pictl

You can vote on testnet proposals using pictl if you have the following setup:

• dcrwallet is running locally on testnet and on the default port.
• A dcrwallet client cert has been setup for pictl using the instructions in the Dcrwallet Authentication section of this README.

Cast a ballot of DCR ticket votes.

$ pictl castballot [token] [voteID]

Dcrwallet Authentication

Voting requires access to wallet GRPC. Therefore this tool needs the wallet's server certificate to authenticate the server, as well as a local client keypair to authenticate the client to dcrwallet. The server certificate by default will be found in ~/.dcrwallet/rpc.cert, and this can be modified to another path using the --walletgrpccert flag. Client certs can be generated using gencerts and pictl will read client.pem and client-key.pem from its application directory by default. The certificate (client.pem) must be appended to ~/.dcrwallet/clients.pem in order for dcrwallet to trust the client.

For example:

$ gencerts ~/.pictl/client{,-key}.pem
$ cat ~/.pictl/client.pem >> ~/.dcrwallet/clients.pem

Dev commands

pictl comes with commands that are useful during development.

seedproposals seeds the backend with users, proposals, comments, and comment upvotes/downvotes.

$ pictl seedproposals email@example.com password

votetestsetup and votetest can be used to setup a batch of proposal votes then to vote on them using your eligible tickets.

$ pictl votetestsetup email@example.com password
$ pictl votetest

Print the help message, pictl -h, to see a full list of these dev commands.