Get Started

The XRP Ledger is always online and entirely public. Anyone can access it directly from a web browser with source code like what's on this page.

The following example gets the latest ledger version and a list of transactions that were newly-validated in that ledger version, using the getLedger() method. Try running it as-is, or change the code and see what happens.

Tip: If you can, open your browser's Developer Tools by pressing F12. The "Console" tab provides a native JavaScript console and can give insight into what code is running on any webpage.

const mainnet = new ripple.RippleAPI({
  server: 'wss://s1.ripple.com'
});

(async function(api) {
  await api.connect();

  let response = await api.getLedger({
    includeTransactions: true
  });
  console.log(response);

})(mainnet);

const mainnet = new ripple.RippleAPI({
  server: 'wss://s.altnet.rippletest.net/'
});

(async function(api) {
  await api.connect();

  let response = await api.getLedger({
      includeTransactions: true
    });
  console.log(response);

})(mainnet);

const mainnet = new ripple.RippleAPI({
  server: 'wss://s1.ripple.com'
});

(async function(api) {
  await api.connect();

  let response = await api.getLedger({
      includeTransactions: true
    });
  let tx_id = response.transactionHashes[0];
  let response2 = await api.getTransaction(tx_id);
  console.log(response2);

})(mainnet);

const mainnet = new ripple.RippleAPI({
  server: 'wss://s1.ripple.com'
});

(async function(api) {
  await api.connect();

  let response = await api.getLedger({
      includeTransactions: true
    });
  console.log('Total XRP: '+api.dropsToXrp(response.totalDrops));

})(mainnet);

Suggestions

Try editing the code above to do something different:

  • Connect to the Testnet public server at wss://s.altnet.rippletest.net/ instead. Answer
  • Look up the details of a transaction using the getTransaction() method. For the id, use one of the transactionHashes from the getLedger() response! Answer
  • Convert the totalDrops from the response to decimal XRP. Answer

Setup Steps

This page has the necessary prerequisites already loaded, but you can access the XRP Ledger from any webpage if you load Lodash and RippleAPI for JavaScript (ripple-lib) in that page's HTML. For example:

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/lodash.js/4.17.21/lodash.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://unpkg.com/ripple-lib@1.9.1/build/ripple-latest-min.js"></script>

Further Reading

When you're ready to move on, continue using the XRP Ledger with these resources: