[!CAUTION] ⛔️ DEPRECATED⛔️
This repository has been deprecated and moved to a new location. Active maintenance on caravan code is now hosted at https://github.com/caravan-bitcoin/caravan
Caravan is making bitcoin multisig custody easier and safer through transparency and standards.
Caravan is a coordination software. It connects to a source of consensus and your keys to build and interact with multisig bitcoin addresses.
Caravan is also stateless. It does not itself store any data. You must safekeep the addresses (and redeem scripts & BIP32 paths) you create.
Caravan is a stateless pure HTML & JavaScript web application. It can be run in any web browser from a local or remote installation.
The simplest way to use Caravan is to visit https://unchained-capital.github.io/caravan, a copy of Caravan hosted on GitHub by Unchained Capital.
If you would prefer to host your own copy of Caravan on GitHub, you
can do so by first forking the
Caravan repository
into your own GitHub organization. You should see a copy of the
Caravan web application at
https://YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME.github.io/caravan
.
If not, go to the (newly forked) repository's "Settings" page and scroll down to the "GitHub Pages" section. Ensure you see a message saying "Your site is published at ...".
You can always clone the source code of Caravan to your local machine
and run it from there. You will require a recent npm
installation.
$ git clone https://github.com/unchained-capital/caravan
...
$ cd caravan
$ npm install
...
$ npm run dev
...
Now visit https://localhost:5137
to interact with your local copy of
Caravan.
Once you have downloaded the source code and used npm
to install
dependences (see section above), you can pre-build the React
application for a production deployment and then host the contents of
the resulting build
directory via a webserver such as nginx
.
$ npm run build
...
You can test the production build locally at http://localhost:4173/
by running:
$ npm start
...
A basic dockerfile which builds the app and serves it via nginx is included in the repository
To build the docker image:
docker build . -t caravan:latest
To run the built docker image:
docker run -p 80:8000 caravan:latest
Caravan should then be accessible at http://localhost:8000/caravan
If you can access the Caravan web application in your browser, you are ready to start using Caravan.
Click the Create or Interact links in the navbar to get started.
See our YouTube playlist for some tutorial videos.
Caravan can connect to several different hardware wallets and key management software.
Trezor One (installing the Trezor Bridge is required to interact with a Trezor device)
Trezor Model T (installing the Trezor Bridge is required to interact with a Trezor device)
Caravan also accepts public keys and signatures as text so any wallet which can export these data can be made to work with Caravan.
By default, Caravan uses a free API provided by mempool.space whenever it needs information about the bitcoin blockchain or to broadcast transactions.
You can ask Caravan to use your own private bitcoind full node.
When asking Caravan to use a private bitcoind node, you may run into
CORS issues.
This is because bitcoin-core
does not natively support CORS headers. Because of how caravan
is designed,
CORS headers are essential to protecting the security of your coins and you will
need to add the appropriate headers.
To correct this problem, you must add appropriate access control
headers to your node's HTTP responses. When running Caravan on your
local machine, for example, you may need to set
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: https://localhost:5137
.
This can be done using a webserver such as nginx or Apache, a proxy tool such as mitmproxy, or even just a script.
A particularly simple way to proxy requests to a private bitcoind node
is to make use of nginx
. Instructions to install
and run the program are on its download page.
Explicitly, install nginx
with
# MacOS
brew install nginx
# Debian Linux
sudo apt install nginx
Copy the server conifiguration file, bitcoind.proxy
, to the appropriate location with the following
commands. Note, these commands assume that you are in the base caravan
directory. An example configuration
file is included with the caravan
source code called bitcoind.proxy
which will, by defualt, enable a mainnet
proxy. The testnet proxy is included, but is commented out.
# MacOS
mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/nginx/sites-available
cp bitcoind.proxy /usr/local/etc/nginx/sites-available/
ln -s /usr/local/etc/nginx/sites-available/bitcoind.proxy /usr/local/etc/nginx/servers/bitcoind.proxy
# Debain Linux
sudo mkdir -p /etc/nginx/sites-available
sudo cp bitcoind.proxy /etc/nginx/sites-available/
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/bitcoind.proxy /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/bitcoind.proxy
Different linux distributions follow different conventions for the /etc/nginx/
directory structure.
As an example, MacOS uses etc/nginx/servers
and Debian distributions use /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
for the website configuration files. You will need to check the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
file to see what
the convention is. This snipet is from a machine using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Note the two directories
that are included. Whereas on MacOS there is only one include
directory, include servers/*;
.
http {
...
##
# Virtual Host Configs
##
include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}
Arch Linux provides more details on how to configure
nginx
for that distribution. It may be as simple as adding include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
in the http
block
of /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
and then:
sudo mkdir -p /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/bitcoind.proxy /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/bitcoind.proxy
Check that everything is copied correctly, properly configured, and that there are no errors in the syntax:
$ nginx -t
nginx: the configuration file /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful
Start nginx
# MacOS
brew services start nginx
# or if nginx is already running
brew services reload nginx
# Debain Linux
sudo systemctl start nginx
# or if nginx is already running
sudo systemctl restart nginx
On MacOS, starting the nginx
daemon will prompt a popup window asking if you want ngingx
to allow incoming network connections, which you will want to allow.
Test the different ports where my_uname
is the user specified in the bitcoin.conf
line
rpcauth=my_uname:
(Don't use this username!):
# Test that bitcoin rpc is functioning correctly
curl --user my_uname --data-binary \
'{"jsonrpc": "1.0", "id":"curltest", "method": "getblockcount", "params": [] }' \
-H 'content-type: text/plain;' http://127.0.0.1:8332
# Test the nginx reverse proxy
curl --user my_uname --data-binary \
'{"jsonrpc": "1.0", "id":"curltest", "method": "getblockcount", "params": [] }' \
-H 'content-type: text/plain;' --resolve bitcoind.localhost:8080:127.0.0.1 http://bitcoind.localhost:8080
Both tests should result in the same output with the current block height, e.g.
{ "result": 668255, "error": null, "id": "curltest" }
If you are running a bitcoind node on the same machine as Caravan,
on port 8332, and you run nginx
with the default settings,
you should be able to point Caravan at 'http://bitcoind.localhost:8080'
to communicate with your node. If you have bitcoind running on a different machine,
you will need to adjust the upstream
block in bitcoind.proxy
for the correct
network address:port. Don't forget to add the the correct rpcallowip=LOCAL_MACHINE_IP
to the remote machine's bitcoin.conf
.
Because the nginx
configuration depends entirely on what is specified in
the upstream
block it is STRONGLY reccommended to keep bitcoind
reserved
for the mainnet and testnet
for the testnet. In this way, nginx
could be
configured to simultaneously provide a reverse proxy to the mainnet via
'http://bitcoind.localhost:8080' and to the testnet via 'http://testnet.localhost:8080'.
nginx
templateupstream bitcoind {
server 127.0.0.1:8332;
}
server {
listen 8080;
server_name bitcoind.localhost;
location / {
...
proxy_pass http://bitcoind;
...
}
}
nginx
templateupstream testnet {
server 127.0.0.1:18332;
}
server {
listen 8080;
server_name testnet.localhost;
location / {
...
proxy_pass http://testnet;
...
}
}
A particularly simple way to proxy requests to a private bitcoind node
is to make use of the corsproxy
npm module. Instructions to install and run the module are on its
home page. corsproxy
has not
been updated in a number of years and will require an earlier version of node
to function properly.
Explicitly, install corsproxy
with
npm install -g corsproxy
and then launch corsproxy
$ corsproxy
[log,info], data: CORS Proxy running at: http://localhost:1337
...
If you are running a bitcoind node on the same machine as Caravan,
on port 8332, and you run corsproxy
with the default settings,
you should be able to point Caravan at 'http://localhost:1337/localhost:8332'
to communicate with your node. A testnet node would be running on a
different port, for example: http://localhost:1337/localhost:18332
, and you
would need to point Caravan to that URL instead.
Finally, a testnet/regtest node running on a different machine but still on the same
network might be accessible to you via http://localhost:1337/192.168.0.22:18332
, but
you need to make sure the ports are open and accessible. It should be clear at this
point that if corsproxy is running, paste your node's IP:port on the end of the
corsproxy
URL: http://localhost:1337/
Please see the CONTRIBUTING.md
and the open GitHub Issues