How to get Ethereum Metadata? admin_getContractInfo does not exist

Question

Is there a way to get the metadata(bytecode, ABI) of a deployed contract if you only know the address of the contract?

In geth there is a function in the admin interface called getContractinfo(), but I get an error when I call it: The method admin_getContractInfo does not exist/is not available

In the documentation(https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/wiki/Contracts-and-Transactions) I saw an example but I don't think it works:

// get the contract info for contract address to do manual verification
var info = admin.getContractInfo(address) // lookup, fetch, decode
var source = info.source;
var abiDef = info.abiDefinition

Answer 1

For the bytecode, you can use web3.eth.getCode(address).

For the ABI, you need to get it from whoever wrote the contract, or generate the ABI from the source code. Generally, you can't figure out the function names from the bytecode, because the bytecode only has a hash of the names, more info: Do I need a compiled contract just to get the ABI definition?

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admin.getContractInfo seems to have been removed. (Note that to use getContractInfo, the earlier steps https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/wiki/Contracts-and-Transactions#contract-info-metadata including saveInfo were also needed.)

Answer 2

Yes, but it's a bit of a hassle (you have to reverse engineer the code/be familiar with the EVM byte code).

There is an example here with the deployed contract here.