To help you get started, we've collected the most common ways that stellar-sdk is being used within popular public projects.

js-stellar-sdk is a JavaScript library for communicating with a Stellar Horizon server and Soroban RPC. It is used for building Stellar apps either on Node.js or in the browser, though it can be used in other environments with some tinkering.

It provides:

• a networking layer API for Horizon endpoints (REST-based),
• a networking layer for Soroban RPC (JSONRPC-based).
• facilities for building and signing transactions, for communicating with a Stellar Horizon instance, and for submitting transactions or querying network history.

Jump to:

• Installation: details on hitting the ground running
• Usage: links to documentation and a variety of workarounds for non-traditional JavaScript environments
  • ...with React Native
  • ...with Expo
  • ...with CloudFlare Workers
• Developing: contribute to the project!
• Understanding stellar-sdk vs. stellar-base
• License

Installation

Using npm or yarn to include stellar-sdk in your own project:

npm install --save @stellar/stellar-sdk
# or
yarn add @stellar/stellar-sdk

Then, require or import it in your JavaScript code:

var StellarSdk = require('@stellar/stellar-sdk');
// or
import * as StellarSdk from '@stellar/stellar-sdk';

(Preferably, you would only import the pieces you need to enable tree-shaking and lower your final bundle sizes.)

Browsers

You can use a CDN:

Note that this method relies on using a third party to host the JS library. This may not be entirely secure. You can self-host it via Bower:

bower install @stellar/stellar-sdk

and include it in the browser:

If you don't want to use or install Bower, you can copy the packaged JS files from the Bower repo, or just build the package yourself locally (see Developing ➡️ Building) and copy the bundle.

Always make sure that you are using the latest version number. They can be found on the releases page in GitHub.

Custom Installation

You can configure whether or not to build the browser bundle with the axios dependency. In order to turn off the axios dependency, set the USE_AXIOS environment variable to false. You can also turn off the eventsource dependency by setting USE_EVENTSOURCE to false.

Build without Axios

npm run build:browser:no-axios

This will create stellar-sdk-no-axios.js in dist/.

Build without EventSource

npm run build:browser:no-eventsource

This will create stellar-sdk-no-eventsource.js in dist/.

Build without Axios and Eventsource

npm run build:browser:minimal

This will create stellar-sdk-minimal.js in dist/.

Usage

The usage documentation for this library lives in a handful of places:

• across the Stellar Developer Docs, which includes tutorials and examples,
• within this repository itself, and
• on the generated API doc site.

You can also refer to:

• the documentation for the Horizon REST API (if using the Horizon module) and
• the documentation for Soroban RPC's API (if using the rpc module)

Usage with React-Native

1. Install yarn add --dev rn-nodeify
2. Add the following postinstall script:

yarn rn-nodeify --install url,events,https,http,util,stream,crypto,vm,buffer --hack --yarn

3. Uncomment require('crypto') on shim.js
4. react-native link react-native-randombytes
5. Create file rn-cli.config.js

module.exports = {
  resolver: {
    extraNodeModules: require("node-libs-react-native"),
  },
};

6. Add import "./shim"; to the top of index.js
7. yarn add @stellar/stellar-sdk

There is also a sample that you can follow.

Note: Only the V8 compiler (on Android) and JSC (on iOS) have proper support for Buffer and Uint8Array as is needed by this library. Otherwise, you may see bizarre errors when doing XDR encoding/decoding such as source not specified.

Usage with Expo managed workflows

1. Install yarn add --dev rn-nodeify
2. Add the following postinstall script:

yarn rn-nodeify --install process,url,events,https,http,util,stream,crypto,vm,buffer --hack --yarn

3. Add import "./shim"; to your app's entry point (by default ./App.js)
4. yarn add @stellar/stellar-sdk
5. expo install expo-random

At this point, the Stellar SDK will work, except that StellarSdk.Keypair.random() will throw an error. To work around this, you can create your own method to generate a random keypair like this:

import * as Random from 'expo-random';
import { Keypair } from '@stellar/stellar-sdk';

const generateRandomKeypair = () => {
  const randomBytes = Random.getRandomBytes(32);
  return Keypair.fromRawEd25519Seed(Buffer.from(randomBytes));
};

Usage with CloudFlare Workers

Both eventsource (needed for streaming) and axios (needed for making HTTP requests) are problematic dependencies in the CFW environment. The experimental branch make-eventsource-optional is an attempt to resolve these issues.

It requires the following additional tweaks to your project:

• the axios-fetch-adapter lets you use axios with fetch as a backend, which is available to CF workers
• it only works with axios@"<= 1.0.0" versions, so we need to force an override into the underlying dependency
• and this can be problematic with newer yarn versions, so we need to force the environment to use Yarn 1

In summary, the package.json tweaks look something like this:

"dependencies": {
  // ...
  "@stellar/stellar-sdk": "git+https://github.com/stellar/js-stellar-sdk#make-eventsource-optional",
  "@vespaiach/axios-fetch-adapter": "^0.3.1",
  "axios": "^0.26.1"
},
"overrides": {
  "@stellar/stellar-sdk": {
    "axios": "$axios"
  }
},
"packageManager": "yarn@1.22.19"

Then, you need to override the adapter in your codebase:

import { Horizon } from '@stellar/stellar-sdk';
import fetchAdapter from '@vespaiach/axios-fetch-adapter';

Horizon.AxiosClient.defaults.adapter = fetchAdapter as any;

// then, the rest of your code...

All HTTP calls will use fetch, now, meaning it should work in the CloudFlare Worker environment.

Developing

So you want to contribute to the library: welcome! Whether you're working on a fork or want to make an upstream request, the dev-test loop is pretty straightforward.

1. Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/stellar/js-stellar-sdk.git

2. Install dependencies inside js-stellar-sdk folder:

cd js-stellar-sdk
yarn

3. Install Node 18

Because we support the oldest maintenance version of Node, please install and develop on Node 18 so you don't get surprised when your code works locally but breaks in CI.

Here's how to install nvm if you haven't: https://github.com/creationix/nvm

nvm install 18

# if you've never installed 18 before you'll want to re-install yarn
npm install -g yarn

If you work on several projects that use different Node versions, you might it helpful to install this automatic version manager: https://github.com/wbyoung/avn

4. Observe the project's code style

While you're making changes, make sure to run the linter to catch any linting errors (in addition to making sure your text editor supports ESLint) and conform to the project's code style.

yarn fmt

Building

You can build the developer version (unoptimized, commented, with source maps, etc.) or the production bundles:

yarn build
# or
yarn build:prod

Testing

To run all tests:

yarn test

To run a specific set of tests:

yarn test:node
yarn test:browser
yarn test:integration

In order to have a faster test loop, these suite-specific commands do not build the bundles first (unlike yarn test). If you make code changes, you will need to run yarn build (or a subset like yarn build:node corresponding to the test suite) before running the tests again to see your changes.

To generate and check the documentation site:

# install the `serve` command if you don't have it already
npm i -g serve

# clone the base library for complete docs
git clone https://github.com/stellar/js-stellar-base

# generate the docs files
yarn docs

# get these files working in a browser
cd jsdoc && serve .

# you'll be able to browse the docs at https://localhost:5000

Publishing

For information on how to contribute or publish new versions of this software to npm, please refer to our contribution guide.

Miscellaneous

stellar-sdk vs stellar-base

stellar-sdk is a high-level library that serves as client-side API for Horizon and Soroban RPC, while `stellar-base is lower-level library for creating Stellar primitive constructs via XDR helpers and wrappers.

Most people will want stellar-sdk instead of stellar-base. You should only use stellar-base if you know what you're doing!

If you add stellar-sdk to a project, do not add stellar-base! Mismatching versions could cause weird, hard-to-find bugs. stellar-sdk automatically installs stellar-base and exposes all of its exports in case you need them.

> Important! The Node.js version of the stellar-base (stellar-sdk dependency) package uses the sodium-native package as an optional dependency. sodium-native is a low level binding to libsodium, (an implementation of Ed25519 signatures). > If installation of sodium-native fails, or it is unavailable, stellar-base (and stellar-sdk) will fallback to using the tweetnacl package implementation. If you are using them in a browser, you can ignore this. However, for production backend deployments, you should be using sodium-native. > If sodium-native is successfully installed and working the StellarSdk.FastSigning variable will return true.

License

js-stellar-sdk is licensed under an Apache-2.0 license. See the LICENSE file for details.