See foreign bitcoin transactions

Question

I'm trying to get a transaction info using

bitcoind gettransaction \
  9962d5c704ec27243364cbe9d384808feeac1c15c35ac790dffd1e929829b271

but I'm receiving

error: {"code":-5,"message":"Invalid or non-wallet transaction id"}

How to see a transaction using bitcoin API?

Answer 1

You can view foreign transactions using bitcoind.

1. Set txindex=1 in your bitcoin.conf file.
2. restart bitcoind with -reindex (you need to re-build your entire index)

After you've indexed a few blocks you can use something like this:

$ bitcoind getblockcount
122735

$ bitcoind getblockhash 67543
0000000004e213266ccd388df12896412c1a70e647b48004f7d6894b9d6f63b9

$ bitcoind getblock 0000000004e213266ccd388df12896412c1a70e647b48004f7d6894b9d6f63b9
// JSON containing tx "a93a668d9332e21d51380c7251bbf5ad47295ca9795e0ad6f2fe8d63b76af9aa"

$ bitcoind getrawtransaction a93a668d9332e21d51380c7251bbf5ad47295ca9795e0ad6f2fe8d63b76af9aa 1
// json of transaction - note that "1" at the end tells bitcoind to decode into json

See this for more.

Answer 2

getrawtransaction <txid> command gets any transaction even from Bitcoin-qt client

Raw Transactions

The "raw transaction API" was introduced with Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind version 0.7. It gives developers or very sophisticated end-users low-level access to transaction creation and broadcast.

This will return hexadecimal string of bytes, which is not very useful. But if you type

getrawtransaction <txid> 1

you'll get nicely formatted JSON representation