A better way to load keypairs

[mikemaccana]

Motivation

Dev Education and DevRel also see a lot of copy-paste efforts to add secret keys to env files, and to load keys from the environment.

It would be good to provide some guidance here:

• People frequently use node along with esrun, ts-node, tsx etc to run js/ts files on the command line when learning.
• People need a good way to persistently save and load keys they've previously generated
• We want to push people to use .env
• We want to push people to .gitignore their env files.

Example use case

The DevRel helpers package has these. You can steal the code.

To load the default keypair ~/.config/solana/id.json, just run:

const keyPair = await getKeypairFromFile();

or to load a specific file:

const keyPair = await getKeypairFromFile("somefile.json");

or using home dir expansion:

const keyPair = await getKeypairFromFile("~/code/solana/demos/steve.json");

For the environment:

const keyPair = await getKeypairFromEnvironment("SECRET_KEY");

Saves a keypair to the environment file.

await addKeypairToEnvFile(testKeypair, "SECRET_KEY");

or to specify a file name:

await addKeypairToEnvFile(testKeypair, "SECRET_KEY", ".env.local");

Details

Code

Interesting, the exciting world of ES6 seems to means that node specific functions (eg, that call node:fs/promises or similar) seem to not prevent a module being used in the browser.