Truffle – How to Import a 3rd Party Contract ABI in Solidity and Truffle

I know the question is old, but I had some problems with this so I will share what helped me.

To import the ABI from a JSON file, you can use the following code (assuming you already have your web3 Object):

var fs = require('fs');
var jsonFile = "pathToYourJSONFile/project.json";
var parsed= JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync(jsonFile));
var abi = parsed.abi;

var YourContract= new web3.eth.Contract(abi, 0x12345678912345678912345678912345678912);

You can read more about it here: https://web3js.readthedocs.io/en/1.0/web3-eth-contract.html

Update 01/2020: Since Typescript 2.9, reading JSON Files is supported directly. So if you try to get the ABI or Bytecode from within a Typescript Project (Angular, React, ...) simply go to your tsconfig.json and set:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "resolveJsonModule": true,
    "esModuleInterop": true  
  }
}

You can then use import ContractName from 'path/to/contract/ContractName.json' to import your Contracts and get the Abi with ContractName.abi.

Cheers

I copy-pasted the Oraclize contract into my Truffle and I was able to migrate the contracts to Kovan by running a Parity node locally. Were you running an account that had Ether on it?

Looking at the Truffle docs, there is an EthPM registry that they suggest to install dependencies using: http://truffleframework.com/docs/getting_started/packages-ethpm. On EthPM, I see there is a Oraclize package. I tried truffle install oraclize, but it didn't seem to do anything. I am not sure if this feature is properly working.

Edit: truffle install oraclize indeed is working and puts the contracts into a directory called installed_contracts.