Solana-web3.js tutorial – Send a Solana transaction in 3 Minutes

Ethan Francis

September 11, 2023

A few weeks ago, we published another article about how to mint an SPL token on Solana, which is a foundational component of Solana development. So, following this trend of covering foundational tutorials in order to support you as a Solana developer, in this tutorial you will learn how to send a Solana transaction using solana-web3.js.

Install solana-web3.js library

To get started you’ll first have to install the solana-web3.js library, with node package manager. You can do that with npm install.

npm install @solana/web3.js

We will also need to install a base58 library. You don’t have to do this if you plan on using an array type private key, but in this case, we plan on using a standard string private key base58, the type of private key you get from a Phantom wallet for example.

So we will need this base58 library in order to do some conversions.

npm install bs58

Define variables

Alright, so now that you have solana-web3.js and bs58 installed, we can go ahead and define your variables in the index file.

const web3 = require("@solana/web3.js");
const bs58 = require("bs58");

Connect to the Solana blockchain

Now you need to connect to the Solana blockchain itself through a connection variable.

Deploy your own Solana node with Chainstack for free

If you do not have a Chainstack account yet, you can sign up for free in order to follow along with this tutorial.

After you have your account, you can go ahead and deploy a node by following the steps in the video below.

Once your node is running, you can click on it to see its details.

Scroll to the bottom of the page and grab the HTTPS endpoint.

Define the connection variable.

const connection = new web3.Connection("copy paste your https endpoint here")

Great, now we can move on to creating the Solana account that is going to send this transaction.

Define the private key variable

const privateKey = new Uint8Array(bs58.decode(process.env['PRIVATE_KEY']));

The code above defines a new variable, called privateKey, and is setting it up to be of type Uint8Array, which calls a base58 object. The code then calls the decode method on the object.

Derive the account from the private key

Now we can go ahead and derive the account from the private key that we’ve just defined.

const account = web3.Keypair.fromSecretKey(privateKey);

Define the account that we are sending to

We will create a fresh account to send funds to.

const account2 = web3.Keypair.generate();

The second account has both a private, and a public key, but in order to send funds to the account, we only need the public key, which is what we will be using here.

Define & push the transaction

(async () => {
   const transaction = new web3.Transaction().add(
    web3.SystemProgram.transfer({
      fromPubKey: account.publicKey,
      toPubKey: account2.publicKey,
      lamports: web3.LAMPORTS_PER_SOL * 0.001,
    }),
   );
   const signature = await web3.sendAndConfirmTransaction(
    connection,
    transaction,
    [account],
   );
})();

We defined a transaction object and our signature, which will push the transaction on the Solana blockchain.