Ordinals API

A service that indexes Bitcoin Ordinals data and exposes it via REST API endpoints.

Table of Contents

• Features
• API Reference
• Quick Start
  • System Requirements
  • Running the API
  • Run Modes
  • Stopping the API

Features

• Complete ordinal inscription ingestion
  • Genesis block and transaction information
  • Transfer history
  • Current location and ownership information
• Satoshi ordinal notation endpoints
• Easy to use REST JSON endpoints with ETag caching
• Run modes for auto-scaling

API Reference

See the Ordinals API Reference for more information.

Quick Start

System Requirements

The Ordinals API is a microservice that has hard dependencies on other systems. Before you start, you'll need to have access to:

1. A Chainhook node with a fully indexed Ordinals .redb database.
2. A local writeable Postgres database for data storage

Running the API

Clone the repo.

Create an .env file and specify the appropriate values to configure the local API server, postgres DB and Chainhook node reachability. See env.ts for all available configuration options.

Build the app (NodeJS v18+ is required)

npm install
npm run build

Start the service

npm run start

Run Modes

To better support auto-scaling server configurations, this service supports three run modes specified by the RUN_MODE environment variable:

• default: Runs all background jobs and the API server. Use this when you're running this service only on one instance. This is the default mode.
• readonly: Runs only the API server. Use this in an auto-scaled cluster when you have multiple readonly instances and just one writeonly instance. This mode needs a writeonly instance to continue populating the DB.
• writeonly: Use one of these in an auto-scaled environment so you can continue consuming new inscriptions. Use in conjunction with multiple readonly instances as explained above.

Stopping the API

When shutting down, you should always prefer to send the SIGINT signal instead of SIGKILL so the service has time to finish any pending background work and all dependencies are gracefully disconnected.