Official bitcoin.conf documentation #7733

I have been looking everywhere (bitcoin.org and here at github) for the official documentation for the bitcoin.conf file. I could not find it, though. Does this documentation exist?

I am especially interested in the documentation for the blocknotify and walletnotify fields.

When do they trigger? In my impression, blocknotify triggers for every block, but I am not sure about walletnotify. Does it trigger for every transaction, or only for transactions mentioning addresses from the wallet? Sometimes it seems to even trigger twice for the same transaction hash.

Are blocknotify or walletnotify affected in any way by addresses imported through the importaddress RPC function?

Some people recently discussed this on IRC and a possible solution would be to place a sample bitcoin.conf during the initial datadir creation. The sample bitcoin.conf could contain (#commented out) all relevant options with some explanations.

It could also be stored under a different filename (bitcoin.sample.con) (some people might say the bitcoin.conf should only be created/controlled by the package maintainers).

There is documentation on it on the wiki at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_Bitcoin#Bitcoin.conf_Configuration_File but I think it would also be a good idea to have a sample bitcoin.conf file included in the install.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_Bitcoin#Bitcoin.conf_Configuration_File

-walletnotify=<cmd>     Execute command when a wallet transaction changes (%s in cmd is replaced by TxID) 

Does this mean: transactions mentioning just wallet addresses or does it also cover imported addresses? There does not seem to be a notification option that would notify for 'any' address (regardless whether it is in the wallet or not)?

An imported address is considered to be a wallet address.

-walletnotify will run the command whenever 1) the transaction is first seen (usually when unconfirmed) 2) the transaction is seen in a block.

I think you can safely remove 'bitcoin.conf' from the issue title. The project doesn't have any official user documentation at all. (nor anyone volunteering to write such.)

As usually with open source projects you need to be someone more crafty to find documentation resources. There are some though:

• The developer documentation (guide and reference) on bitcoin.org comes closest to this: https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-documentation. They are excellently written by @harding et al.
• As mentioned, the wiki.
• For specific questions (such as about walletnotify and blocknotify) you should use the stack exchange: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/

(and to get a short help message for all bitcoin.conf options, use bitcoind --help)

Just to mention for completeness: There is an unmaintained .conf in /contrib/debian/examples/bitcoin.conf

Nothing left to be done here, closing.

So as I can see, the issue is closed, and there is a sample bitcoin.conf in the repo with helpful comments, but blocknotify & walletnotify are not even mentioned there? Wouldn't it make sense to mention them? Because so far one can only assume the existence of these features from stackexchange and board discussions, but not from the original repository nor from the available versions of documentation.

You can get documentation with bitcoind -?

or with the manpages, of course