[Ethereum] How to create a local account from an external private key in Web3.py

dappsethereum-wallet-dappweb3.py

I've been using local_account = w3.eth.account.create(keys['private_key_1']) to create a local account offline. When I check the public key returned from local_account.address it does not match the existing public key. What should I do?

P.S. The key returned is a string & I've tried changing the private key format from "0x12345" to "12345". I think this is a solution but I can't figure out how to instantiate the class and call the from_key method.

Best Answer

That's because the attribute of the function w3.eth.account.create(...) is not the private key.

To generate an account from an external private key you must use the function w3.eth.account.privateKeyToAccount(...).

Example:

>>> private_key = "f8f8a2f43c8376ccb0871305060d7b27b0554d2cc72bccf41b2705608452f315"
>>> acct = w3.eth.account.privateKeyToAccount(private_key)
>>> acct.address
'0x001d3F1ef827552Ae1114027BD3ECF1f086bA0F9'

privateKeyToAccount will be deprecated for version 0.5 and replaced by w3.eth.account.from_key(...).

Example:

>>> private_key = 0xf8f8a2f43c8376ccb0871305060d7b27b0554d2cc72bccf41b2705608452f315
>>> acct = Account.from_key(private_key)
>>> acct.address
'0x001d3F1ef827552Ae1114027BD3ECF1f086bA0F9'

Related Solutions

[Ethereum] How to get private key from account address and password

I used this code to recover the private key from account address and password. firstly, install Keythereum:

npm install keythereum

Keythereum is a JavaScript tool to generate, import and export Ethereum keys. read the documentation: GitHub Link

and this is my code:

var keythereum = require("keythereum");
var datadir = "/home/super/.ethereum/rinkeby";
var address= "0xc8096d713000002c77e4eb62f0000ead5f105a7e";
const password = "mypass";

var keyObject = keythereum.importFromFile(address, datadir);
var privateKey = keythereum.recover(password, keyObject);
console.log(privateKey.toString('hex'));

[Ethereum] Python ethereum create account using web3.py

Update: web3.py v4 has been stable for a while, so the question and answer don't really make sense anymore. w3.eth.account is included in any modern install.

In order to use the latest w3.eth.account feature, you will have to either:

Wait for the v4 beta to come out (in the next week or so)
Install web3.py from source

Installing from source

git clone https://github.com/pipermerriam/web3.py.git
cd web3.py

virtualenv -p python3 venv
. venv/bin/activate

pip install -e .
python
>>> from web3 import Web3, ...

Documentation Info

The web3 documentation you're referring to is for "latest", which corresponds to the source code on master at http://github.com/pipermerriam/web3.py

To see what features are available in v3, see the stable web3 documentation instead.