How to connect mist to a testnet client?

Question

I'm running a geth instance on the consensys testnet. I started it with the following command:

geth --testnet --networkid=2 --bootnodes=enode://b1217cbaa440e35ed471157123fe468e19e8b5ad5bedb4b1fdbcbdab6fb2f5ed3e95dd9c24a22a79fdb2352204cea207df27d92bfd21bfd41545e8b16f637499@104.44.138.37:30303 --genesis=/tmp/genesis.json --datadir=~/.ethereum-consensys-public-testnet

Now I'm trying to run mist on top of this but it does not work at all, because it can not connect to the geth IPC.

 $ mist
CONNECT to IPC PATH: /home/user/.ethereum/geth.ipc
NODECONNECTOR ERROR { [Error: connect ECONNREFUSED /home/user/.ethereum/geth.ipc]
  code: 'ECONNREFUSED',
  errno: 'ECONNREFUSED',
  syscall: 'connect',
  address: '/home/user/.ethereum/geth.ipc' }
Node type:  geth
Network:  main

It tries to connect to the main network IPC. I tried several flags on the mist command, but it does not seem to recognize them. How to connect mist to a testnet client?

Answer 1

Move your ~/.ethereum wallet to a different location (if you already have one so as not to mess up your live stuff), take off the --datadir on your geth line, re-run everything, and it should work. ~/.ethereum is hard coded in Mist. (for now?)

https://github.com/ethereum/mist/blob/v0.3.8/modules/ipc/getIpcPath.js

module.exports = function() {
    var p = require('path');
    var path = global.path.HOME;

    if(process.platform === 'darwin')
        path += '/Library/Ethereum/geth.ipc';

    if(process.platform === 'freebsd' ||
       process.platform === 'linux' ||
       process.platform === 'sunos')
        path += '/.ethereum/geth.ipc';

    if(process.platform === 'win32')
        path = '\\\\.\\pipe\\geth.ipc';

    console.log('CONNECT to IPC PATH: '+ path);
    return path;
};

Alternatively, you can have just have the .ipc file in the right place that Mist is looking for it (specify an IPC file in the ~/.ethereum directory from geth and a datadir some other place), but to me this seems more complicated.