bitcoin/doc/release-notes.md

(note: this is a temporary file, to be added-to by anybody, and moved to release-notes at release time)

Notable changes

SSL support for RPC dropped

SSL support for RPC, previously enabled by the option rpcssl has been dropped from both the client and the server. This was done in preparation for removing the dependency on OpenSSL for the daemon completely.

Trying to use rpcssl will result in an error:

Error: SSL mode for RPC (-rpcssl) is no longer supported.

If you are one of the few people that relies on this feature, a flexible migration path is to use stunnel. This is an utility that can tunnel arbitrary TCP connections inside SSL. On e.g. Ubuntu it can be installed with:

sudo apt-get install stunnel4

Then, to tunnel a SSL connection on 28332 to a RPC server bound on localhost on port 18332 do:

stunnel -d 28332 -r 127.0.0.1:18332 -p stunnel.pem -P ''

It can also be set up system-wide in inetd style.

Another way to re-attain SSL would be to setup a httpd reverse proxy. This solution would allow the use of different authentication, loadbalancing, on-the-fly compression and caching. A sample config for apache2 could look like:

Listen 443

NameVirtualHost *:443
<VirtualHost *:443>

SSLEngine On
SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/server.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl/server.key

<Location /bitcoinrpc>
    ProxyPass http://127.0.0.1:8332/
    ProxyPassReverse http://127.0.0.1:8332/
    # optional enable digest auth
    # AuthType Digest
    # ...
    
    # optional bypass bitcoind rpc basic auth
    # RequestHeader set Authorization "Basic <hash>"
    # get the <hash> from the shell with: base64 <<< bitcoinrpc:<password>
</Location>

# Or, balance the load:
# ProxyPass / balancer://balancer_cluster_name

</VirtualHost>

Random-cookie RPC authentication

When no -rpcpassword is specified, the daemon now uses a special 'cookie' file for authentication. This file is generated with random content when the daemon starts, and deleted when it exits. Its contents are used as authentication token. Read access to this file controls who can access through RPC. By default it is stored in the data directory but its location can be overridden with the option -rpccookiefile.

This is similar to Tor's CookieAuthentication: see https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-manual.html.en

This allows running bitcoind without having to do any manual configuration.

Low-level RPC API changes

• Monetary amounts can be provided as strings. This means that for example the argument to sendtoaddress can be "0.0001" instead of 0.0001. This can be an advantage if a JSON library insists on using a lossy floating point type for numbers, which would be dangerous for monetary amounts.

Option parsing behavior

Command line options are now parsed strictly in the order in which they are specified. It used to be the case that -X -noX ends up, unintuitively, with X set, as -X had precedence over -noX. This is no longer the case. Like for other software, the last specified value for an option will hold.

0.12.0 Change log

Detailed release notes follow. This overview includes changes that affect behavior, not code moves, refactors and string updates. For convenience in locating the code changes and accompanying discussion, both the pull request and git merge commit are mentioned.

RPC and REST

Configuration and command-line options

Block and transaction handling

P2P protocol and network code

Validation

Build system

Wallet

GUI

Tests

Miscellaneous

• Removed bitrpc.py from contrib