Truffle migration: Error: authentication needed: password or unlock

Question

I'm deploying contract using Truffle and got an error Error: authentication needed: password or unlock. I already checked related questions and found only ugly hacks like "unlock desired account directly on node using web3.personal.unlockAccount". But I do not want to connect to my node each time (I have 3 test networks in my truffle.js) when I want to deploy new version.

My question is: is there any way to specify password in truffle infrastructure to unlock account specified in field from under the network item? password or pass does not work.

Answer 1

Ok, finally I added some code to unlock account on the fly. I do not want to store password in truffle.js (but it is possible), so doing next things:

Changed 1_initial_migration.js this way:

const Web3 = require('web3');

const TruffleConfig = require('../truffle');

var Migrations = artifacts.require("./Migrations.sol");


module.exports = function(deployer, network, addresses) {
  const config = TruffleConfig.networks[network];

  if (process.env.ACCOUNT_PASSWORD) {
    const web3 = new Web3(new Web3.providers.HttpProvider('http://' + config.host + ':' + config.port));

    console.log('>> Unlocking account ' + config.from);
    web3.personal.unlockAccount(config.from, process.env.ACCOUNT_PASSWORD, 36000);
  }

  console.log('>> Deploying migration');
  deployer.deploy(Migrations);
};

And instead of calling truffle deploy I am running it like:

ACCOUNT_PASSWORD=MySup4P@ssw0rd truffle deploy

As you can see node url and port are taken from config, so it is possible to add password fields there, then check in migration for "callability" i.e.:

...
password: function() { return process.env.ACCOUNT_PASSWORD }
...

-- same thing but password logic will be moved to truffle.js

Answer 2

If you're using this for dev purposes, there could be another way which is to have a script which unlocks the accounts periodically. The advantage of this method is that the migration scripts need not be updated.

An example of this can be found in the trufflesuite/truffle geth-accounts.js. Although the method above is still highly inefficient, since it tries to unlock accounts in an infinite loop. A slightly remodified version looks like this

 function unlockAccounts () {
  eth.accounts.forEach(function (account) {
    console.log('Unlocking ' + account + '.');
    personal.unlockAccount(account, '', 86400);
  });
}


function createAccounts() {
  for (var i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
    acc = personal.newAccount("");
    eth.sendTransaction({
      from: eth.accounts[0], 
      to: acc, 
      value: web3.toWei(100, "ether")
    });
  }
  unlockAccounts();
  setInterval(unlockAccounts, 86000);
}

createAccounts();