Can I mine on my private blockchain using geth with rpc?

Question

I am using the web3 api and want to try out mining using rpc. The usual miner.start() (which is used on terminal) does not work even after including the miner api when starting geth and I get the following error.

Error: Cannot read property start of undefined.

What am I missing?

Answer 1

Web3 is not exposing a miner object as its own. Refer here

You can do this from ipc socket with help of javascript.

• Save the function as a file mine.js
• Load the script into ipc console using loadScript('YOURPATH/mine.js');
• Make sure you have necessary modules loaded. geth --rpc --rpcapi web3,eth,net,personal,miner,admin,debug--rpcaddr="localhost" --rpcport="8545" --rpccorsdomain="localhost:8545" console

An example would be

/*
 * Mine when there are transactions!
 */

var mining_threads = 1

function checkWork() {
  if (eth.getBlock("pending").transactions.length > 0) {
    if (eth.mining) return;
    console.log("== Pending transactions! Mining...");
    miner.start(mining_threads);
  } else {
    miner.stop(0);  // This param means nothing
    console.log("== No transactions! Mining stopped.");
  }
}

eth.filter("latest", function(err, block) { checkWork(); });
eth.filter("pending", function(err, block) { checkWork(); });

checkWork();

You can refer more ethereum utility snippets

Answer 2

try to load geth with the miner module:

e.g : --ipcapi "admin,db,eth,debug,miner,personal,web3"

Answer 3

I finally used an extended web3 module. Used npm install web3admin and then in my server code wrote web3Admin.extend(web3). This allows me to use the miner api.