Command Line Interface

This command line interface provides a collection of tools for key generation, transaction construction, certificate creation and other important tasks.

It is organized in a hierarchy of subcommands, and each level comes with its own built-in documentation of command syntax and options.

We can get the top level help by simply typing the command without arguments:

cardano-cli

We will be told that one available subcommand is node, and typing:

cardano-cli node

will display available sub-subcommands, one of which is key-gen. Typing:

cardano-cli node key-gen

will inform us about the parameters this command takes, so we can for example generate a key-pair of offline keys and a file for the issue counter by typing:

cardano-cli node key-gen \
    --cold-verification-key-file cold.vkey \
    --cold-signing-key-file cold.skey \
    --operational-certificate-issue-counter-file cold.counter