BitcoinDroid is a thin Android client for Bitcoin. It relies on a headless Bitcoin server running somewhere. The server must use the standard Bitcoin RPC API and accept SSL connections, e.g. via stunnel.

For reference, here’s a possible way to set up your server:

1. I created a startup script, /etc/init.d/bitcoind-ssl. It looks like this:

#!/bin/sh -e

[ -x /usr/local/bin/bitcoind ] || exit 0

. /lib/lsb/init-functions

. /etc/default/rcS

PORT=38976

USER=username

case "$1" in

    start)

   log_begin_msg "Starting bitcoind…"

   su $USER -c ~$USER/bin/bcstart

        /usr/bin/stunnel -d $PORT -r 8332

   ;;

    stop)

   log_begin_msg "Stopping bitcoind…"

   su $USER -c ~$USER/bin/bcstop

   echo Waiting for server to shutdown cleanly…

   sleep 2

   fuser -n tcp $PORT -k

   ;;

    restart|force-reload)

   su $USER -c ~$USER/bin/bcstop

   echo Waiting for server to shutdown cleanly…

   sleep 2

   fuser -n tcp $PORT -k

   su $USER -c ~$USER/bin/bcstart

        /usr/bin/stunnel -d $PORT -r 8332

   ;;

    status)

   su $USER -c ~$USER/bin/bcstatus

   ;;

    *)

   echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/bitcoind-ssl {start|stop|restart|force-reload}"

   exit 1

   ;;

esac

exit 0

2. I made three scripts in ~/bin, bcstart, bcstop, and bcstatus. The names are pretty descriptive. These scripts contain my password but are only readable by me and root, so that’s relatively safe (esp. since I’m root).

3. I scheduled the init script to start at boot-time. You can do something like sudo update-rc.d bitcoind-ssl defaults.

And, just for completeness, I use logrotate to simultaneously rotate my bitcoin logs and do staggered backups of my wallet. Here is logrotate.conf, which can be scheduled in cron (“0 1 * * * /usr/sbin/logrotate —state /home/username/.bitcoin/logrotate.state /home/username/.bitcoin/logrotate.conf”):

/home/username/.bitcoin/debug.log{

      rotate 5

      prerotate

         /home/username/bin/bcstop

         sleep 3

         cp ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat.4 ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat.5

         cp ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat.3 ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat.4

         cp ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat.2 ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat.3

         cp ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat.1 ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat.2

         cp ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat.1

      endscript

      compress

      postrotate

         /home/username/bin/bcstart

      endscript

}