Activating a Alphanet Faucet Wallet Remotely (without tezos-client)

Question

Yesterday I learned that the JSON provided from the Alphanet wallet must first be activated using activate account e.g. ./tezos-client activate account myRandomAlias with tzWhAtEvEr.json (thanks Fredcy!) which also led me to find this section in the developer documentation https://tezos.gitlab.io/master/introduction/howtouse.html#get-free-tez.

Is there a way to perform this action without tezos-client, but rather by using a library such as eztz or sotez with a remote provider? I see that sotez does have a "Activate" method, but I have tried several combinations of values extracted from the faucet JSON to no avail. https://github.com/AndrewKishino/sotez/wiki/Documentation#activate

When ZuluRepublic initially engaged Tezos about implementing Tezos into our suite of products, we were told that this could likely be achieved without hosting our own node, but now I am wondering if that isn't true?

Edit: To elaborate, my intention is to handle key generation, storage, transaction building, and signing local (offline methods) and using a remote provider only to fetch public data like blocks, transactions, balances, and to broadcast signed transactions.

I am accustomed to faucets that ask for an address to send tokens to, where I would enter the address to a wallet I control, and then I can begin experimenting with sending and receiving tezzies in my codebase. But with this faucet, it seems like I would need to have my own node so I can use tezos-client to activate it.

Answer 1

Yes this is possible with sotez. There initially was a bug with the activate function which was just fixed in 0.2.11. You can do something like the following to activate an account as well as generate the keys:

import { rpc, crypto } from 'sotez';

// tz1eQV2GqDTY7dTucnjzNgvB5nP4H5c7Xr5m.json
const accountJSON = {
  "mnemonic": [
    "raw",
    "peace",
    "visual",
    "boil",
    "prefer",
    "rebel",
    "anchor",
    "right",
    "elegant",
    "side",
    "gossip",
    "enroll",
    "force",
    "salmon",
    "between"
  ],
  "secret": "0c5fa9a3d707acc816d23940efdef01aa071bdc6",
  "amount": "12358548903",
  "pkh": "tz1eQV2GqDTY7dTucnjzNgvB5nP4H5c7Xr5m",
  "password": "wc0W7jn3Vf",
  "email": "gfjilgzu.trfhzzzk@tezos.example.org"
};

const activateAccount = async (accountJSON) => {
  let keys;
  try {
    const activatedOperation = await rpc.activate(accountJSON.pkh, accountJSON.secret);
    await rpc.awaitOperation(activatedOperation.hash);
    keys = await crypto.generateKeys(accountJSON.mnemonic.join(' '), `${accountJSON.email}${accountJSON.password}`);
    console.log(keys);
  } catch (e) {
    console.log(e);
  }
};

activateAccount(accountJSON);

Some things you can see from the example is that the mnemonic is entered as a string and the passphrase is the concatenated email and password values from the JSON file.

Answer 2

You can do this using the eztz library. Here are the relevant commands you want to look at:

//Point to alphanet node
eztz.node.setProvider("https://alphanet.tezrpc.me");

//From https://faucet.tzalpha.net/
var faucet = {
  "mnemonic": [
    "viable",
    "decline",
    "spend",
    "excess",
    "hour",
    "panel",
    "decade",
    "sniff",
    "blame",
    "crane",
    "enact",
    "clever",
    "rival",
    "bundle",
    "silk"
  ],
  "secret": "b318178ddad24f1f9f789aecdbe62a4f4723f47f",
  "amount": "19080702922",
  "pkh": "tz1XfgzFAdNijPdANxxJ69wYUdHfYrWr4bqS",
  "password": "Omxz6rDlHz",
  "email": "xktvhnlk.vnzorwib@tezos.example.org"
};

//Generate keys
var keys = eztz.crypto.generateKeys(faucet.mnemonic.join(" "), faucet.email + faucet.password);
if (keys.pkh != faucet.pkh) throw "Invalid";

//Activate
eztz.rpc.activate(faucet.pkh, faucet.secret).then(function(d){
  console.log(d);
});

This queries the remote tezrpc Alphanet node, constructs keys and forges operations locally and injects the activation operation into the node.