In order to work with blockchain data with libbitcoin, it is necessary to install and build the Libbitcoin-Client library which exposes api calls to Libbitcoin-Servers thus enabling developers to work with data queried from the p2p network.
Installing Libbitcoin-Client is very similar to installing the core libbitcoin library, it simply requires installing one other dependency, another libbitcoin library called Libbitcoin-Protocol. Libbitcoin-Protocol is a custom query protocol for getting blockchain data from a Libbitcoin-Server, it is built on zeroMQ and provides a clean way of communicating with blockchain servers. Libbitcoin-Protocol is also a clean frontier for innovation within the libbitcoin ecosystem, enabling open source programmers to create custom query functions that increase privacy and/or security.
To install simply invoke the following commands in your working directory, similarly to how libbitcoin was installed.
alpha$ git clone https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-protocol.git alpha$ cd libbitcoin-protocol alpha$ git branch --all alpha$ git checkout remotes/origin/version3 alpha$ git checkout -b version3 alpha$ ./autogen.sh alpha$ ./configure alpha$ make alpha$ sudo make install
Once the Libbitcoin-Protocol is installed building and installing Libbitcoin-Client is, again, very similar:
alpha$ git clone https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-client.git alpha$ cd libbitcoin-client alpha$ git branch --all alpha$ git checkout remotes/origin/version3 alpha$ git checkout -b version3 alpha$ ./autogen.sh alpha$ ./configure alpha$ make alpha$ sudo make install
Once this build is completed, Libbitcoin-Client should be installed allowing the developer to create applications that use blockchain data by querying Libbitcoin-Servers in an asynchronous fashion.