About The Project

ortty is a Bitcoin block explorer for the terminal with a focus on Ordinals Inscriptions. It has an interactive UI that allows you to explore the Blockchain in real time, view inscriptions (including images) in the terminal, open them on ordinals.com, etc. It also has a scriptable CLI that allow you to view, extract and filter inscriptions with shell commands.

Getting Started

1. You must be running a Bitcoin Core node, preferably with txindex=1 (though not strictly required).
2. ortty must be able to connect to your node using either a username/password or the Bitcoin Core cookie file. You may specify this information on the command line with --host <USER>, --user <USER>, --password <PASSWORD> and --cookie <PATH>. If you do not specify a path for the cookie, it will search known folders. They can also be passed in environment variables: BITCOIN_HOST, BITCOIN_USER, BITCOIN_PASS and BITCOIN_COOKIE.
3. If you have a .env file in the current working directory, ortty will read the environment variables from that file as well.

How To Use: Interactive Block Explorer

Enter the interactive block explorer by running ortty explore. You will be presented with various menu options, which can be navigated and selected using the <ENTER> key:

• View Blocks will show you the Bitcoin blocks in descending order from most recent. Selecting a block will present a further menu with every inscription located in that black. Navigate the inscriptions and view them one at a time by hitting <ENTER> again.
• Inscription Filters give you a list of inscription types which you can filter with. Current options are Text for any plain text, JSON for any JSON inscriptions, BRC-20 for any BRC-20-specific inscriptions, HTML for known HTML inscriptions, and finally Image for any image based inscriptions. All of these options are selected by default. Note: In most cases, ortty does not trust the inscriptions media type, but instead uses heuristics to guess the images files type.
• Extra Options has a few useful additional features. You can tell ortty to extract any inscriptions you view interactively to the current working folder, using the format <INSCRIPTION_ID>.<guessed file extension>. You can also tell ortty to open any inscriptions you view on the web.

How To Use: CLI

There are two CLI commands: inscription and scan. To view a single inscription, you can run ortty inscription <inscription_id> and it will display the inscription in the terminal and exit. This requires your connected node has txindex=1 set.

The command scan is more complicated and more useful. It can scan a block, transaction or transaction input for all inscriptions and outputs them in various ways. You can use a combination of the --block <BLOCK HASH OR BLOCK HEIGHT> and --tx <TXID> to scan. If you do not specify --tx then it will scan the whole block. You can specify only --tx if your node runs with the txindex=1 option.

Additionally, you can use --web to open the transaction on the Ordinals indexer. You can use --extract <FOLDER> to extract the the inscriptions to an output folder. It will use heuristics to guess the appropriate file extension and it take the name <INSCRIPTION_ID>.<extension>. You can use --filter <FILTER> to filter the inscriptions by different types: text, json, brc20, html and image. You can specify --filter multiples times and it will treat them as an OR filter.