Account Creation

Accounts are represented by the Account class. They are always based on a private key, that can either be given explicitly, extracted from a keystore file or generated randomly. Accordingly, three methods are available to create account objects:

>>> from eth_accounts import Account
>>> account = Account.from_private_key('0xff')
>>> with open('tests/testdata/pbkdf2_keystore_template.json') as keystore_file:
...     another_account = Account.from_keystore(keystore_file, b'password')
...
>>> third_account = Account.new()

After initialization, the private key as well as the inferred public key and address are accessible via properties:

>>> account.private_key
'0x00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000ff'
>>> account.public_key
'0x041b38903a43f7f114ed4500b4eac7083fdefece1cf29c63528d563446f972c1804036edc931a60ae889353f77fd53de4a2708b26b6f5da72ad3394119daf408f9'
>>> account.address
'0x5044a80bD3eff58302e638018534BbDA8896c48A'

Note that all output is hex encoded and the address EIP55 checksummed.

Accounts that have been imported from keystores, have two additional properties: The address found in the keystore in plain text (which usually but not necessarily is the same as the actual address) and an identifier:

>>> account.exposed_address
'88e422c8c5f12f7a484c7bbd070b14a027d55364'
>>> account.id
'386aff9b-9e44-4b3c-b731-37d64726e757'

If those are not available, they fall back to None.