When is the geth.ipc file produced?

Question

I'd like to access geth.ipc file in order to connect geth via IPC. I've got an advice and it suggested me to access geth.ipc, but I've not found it on my mac. Could you tell me when that file is produced? Btw, I installed go-ethereum by git as follows.

git clone https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum

The image shows my Ethereum directory. Doesn't it contain geth.ipc right?

Answer 1

The IPC file is only present when Geth is actually running. So be sure to start Geth and you should see a message like.

I0219 09:45:48.128503 node/node.go:290] IPC endpoint opened: /Users/username/Library/Ethereum/geth.ipc

The location displayed here depends on your operating system. These are the other options.

macOS

~/Library/Ethereum/

Linux

~/.ethereum/

Windows

~/AppData/Roaming/Ethereum

Answer 2

IPC is short for inter-process communication and is no standard file in your installation or environment but rather a domain socket.

After you installed geth the ipc socket is not automatically created and its also not considerable a permanent resource.

The geth.ipc socket only exists as long as geth is running. You can specify the ipc path with the --ipcpath "/path/to/my/geth.ipc" flag. You can control the available apis with the --ipcapi flag. You can disable IPC with --ipcdisable. From geth --help:

--ipcdisable                            Disable the IPC-RPC server
--ipcapi "admin,eth,debug,miner,net,shh,txpool,personal,web3"   API's offered over the IPC-RPC interface
--ipcpath "geth.ipc"                        Filename for IPC socket/pipe within the datadir (explicit paths escape it)

Read more on the go-ethereum wiki on management apis.

Answer 3

For window10,

the path is in format \.\pipe\xxxxx.ipc

If you have this in your config.toml

[Node]
IPCPath = "geth.ipc"

you could do

geth_windows.exe attach \\.\pipe\geth.ipc