Restoring a backed-up wallet

If, for whatever reason, your Golem wallet is destroyed or corrupted e.g. you moved on to a new machine and forgot to take Golem's installation with it, you'll be faced with the necessity to recover your wallet from your previously backed-up keystore file.

To restore your wallet, first start with a fresh yagna install:

curl -sSf https://join.golem.network/as-requestor | bash -

Once Yagna is installed, run it with:

yagna service run

Now, as usual, leave the service running in the background and proceed with the rest of the process in another terminal window.

Here you'll need the key.json file you had previously backed up. Do whatever you need to restore it - e.g. decrypt it if you previously encrypted it. For the process to work, it must be the same plain-text JSON file that Yagna originally exported.

Ensure that your key.json file is in your current working directory and run:

yagna id create --from-keystore ./key.json

This should create a new identity in Yagna based on your backed-up wallet. If the private key that you just imported is password-protected, the message that you receive on a successful import will include isLocked: true which means that you'll need to unlock the key later on before it can be used by Yagna.

On the other hand, if the message reads: isLocked: false, it means that you're using an unprotected keystore file.

1. Using the Ethereum address of your backed-up wallet, run:

yagna id update --set-default 0x-the-address

2. Stop your Yagna service

(Just press Ctrl-C in the console that's running yagna service run and wait for the service to exit)

3. Remove yagna's accounts configuration file

Depending on your operating system, please use the appropriate command:

rm $HOME/.local/share/yagna/accounts.json

4. Start your yagna service again (as usual, do it in a separate command line terminal and allow it to run in the background)

yagna service run

5. Ensure Yagna is using your newly restored wallet

yagna id show

The nodeId property should display the Ethereum address of your backed-up wallet.

isLocked: true

To unlock your key, you can use:

yagna id unlock

and supply the key's password.

This will unlock your key and yagna will be able to use it for outgoing payments. You can confirm that the operation succeeded by verifying that the output now reports:

isLocked: false

You'll need to unlock your key each time you start your Yagna service because, for security reasons, Yagna does not save your passphrase anywhere.

If you have used yagna before, you have probably already created an application key (the key that the requestor agent uses to connect to the yagna service).

In that case, after you import your Ethereum mainnet key, you need to re-create Yagna's application key, as the previous one is now bound to your old key:

yagna app-key create requestor-mainnet

The name (requestor-mainnetabove) is not important as long as it doesn't collide with the existing one (assuming it was just requestor).

After you have done that, run:

yagna app-key list

and verify that, in the table like the one below, your new app-key is bound to your mainnet Ethereum address

┌─────────────────────┬────────────────┬───────────────────────────┬───────────┬──────────────────────────────┐
│  name               │  key           │  id                       │  role     │  created                     │
├─────────────────────┼────────────────┼───────────────────────────┼───────────┼──────────────────────────────┤
│  requestor-mainnet  │  your-app-key  │  0x-your-mainnet-address  │  manager  │  2021-07-06T11:41:52.252257  │
└─────────────────────┴────────────────┴───────────────────────────┴───────────┴──────────────────────────────┘

Lastly, remember to set the new app-key in your environment (or in another way you supply the app key to your requestor agent app).