Hello Aptos CLI!

Introduction

The Aptos CLI is a powerful command-line interface that allows you to interact with the Aptos blockchain. It provides a wide range of commands to manage accounts, deploy smart contracts, and perform various operations on the blockchain.

You will become familiar with it the longer you develop on the Aptos blockchain, as it is a key tool for compiling, testing, deploying, and interacting with contracts on the Aptos blockchain.

Installation

If you haven't already installed the Aptos CLI, please refer to the Installation guide for instructions on how to install it on your system. The CLI is available for macOS, Linux, and Windows for both x86 and ARM systems.

Hello Aptos CLI

In this section, we will explore some basic commands of the Aptos CLI to interact with the blockchain. We will cover submitting transactions and querying accounts.

Initializing the CLI

First, determine whether you want a workspace style config or a global style config. By default, it uses workspace which means credentials and configuration will be based in your current directory. When you change directories, you will not use those credentials, and then will need to create different ones for each directory. If you want a global config that is shared among all directories, run the following command:

aptos config set-global-config --config-type global

Once we've set that, we will need to create the default profile for the Aptos CLI. This profile will store your account keys and create an account for you to use with the CLI. To initialize the CLI, run the following command in your terminal:

aptos init

This command will prompt you to create a new account if you have not already created one. It will look something like this:

$ aptos init
Configuring for profile default
Choose network from [devnet, testnet, mainnet, local, custom | defaults to devnet]

You can choose the network you want to connect to. For this example, we will use the devnet network, which is a short lived test network that is reset once a week. It is a great place to start experimenting with the Aptos CLI and easy to ignore your early mistakes. You can just press Enter to select the default devnet network.

Next, it will prompt you to enter your private key. If you do not have a private key, you can generate a new one by just pressing Enter. If you have a private key, you can enter it as a hex literal (starting with 0x). The prompt will look like this:

Enter your private key as a hex literal (0x...) [Current: Redacted | No input: Generate new key (or keep one if present)]

The CLI will then automatically fund and create an account for you on the devnet network. You will see output similar to the following:

Account 0x78077fe8db589e1a3407170cf8af3bd60a8c95737918c15dd6f49dcbecc7900a is not funded, funding it with 100000000 Octas
Account 0x78077fe8db589e1a3407170cf8af3bd60a8c95737918c15dd6f49dcbecc7900a funded successfully

---
Aptos CLI is now set up for account 0x78077fe8db589e1a3407170cf8af3bd60a8c95737918c15dd6f49dcbecc7900a as profile default!
---

{
  "Result": "Success"
}

This means that your account is now set up and ready to use with the Aptos CLI!

Similarly, you can create additional profiles by running the aptos init command with the --profile <profile_name>. Then any of those accounts can be used with the CLI by specifying the --profile <profile_name> flag in your commands.

Additionally, if you want to change the network for your profile, you can use the aptos init command again to change the network:

aptos init --profile default --network <network_name>

Submitting a Transaction

Now that we have initialized the CLI and created an account, we can submit a transaction to the blockchain. For this example, we will send some Octas (subunit of the native APT token of the Aptos blockchain) from our account to another account.

To send Octas, we will use the aptos account transfer command. This command allows you to send funds to an account on the blockchain. The command syntax is as follows:

aptos account transfer --account <recipient_address> --amount <amount>

Note that the --account flag is used to specify the recipient's address, and the --amount flag is used to specify the amount to send in Octas. For example, to send 10 Octas to the account 0x78077fe8db589e1a3407170cf8af3bd60a8c95737918c15dd6f49dcbecc7900a, you would run: