Most people getting started with Veil begin with the graphical user interface (GUI) Qt wallet.

When using this, generating a wallet or restoring from a new one is prompted when first starting.

When starting veild on the command line you will miss seeing the automatically generated wallet's seed words unless you ensure that -daemon (run in the background and allow you to do other commands) is not active.

You might be in this mode if you have 

daemon=1

in your veil.conf configuration file that lives in your Veil data folder.

It will only be there if you put it there, as it is not there by default.

This can be overridden by using 

./veild -daemon=0 -generateseed

on the command line (in the Terminal window).


You also might be in this mode if you started with 

./veild -daemon

This is a common way of starting Veil on the command line when you already have a wallet data file (wallet.dat).

An easy way to deal with this is to start with 

./veild -generateseed

You will then be able to write down the seed words and securely store them, before opening up another Terminal window in order to stop the Veil wallet.

./veil-cli stop

Usually I like also to check the debug log or getblockchaininfo before the first shut down, or you may also need to copy in the files extracted from an official blockchain snapshot. You can find information about that by searching for snapshot. How to use a snapshot

Having done that you may start up the wallet in daemon mode to enable using the command line interface to issue commands to the wallet all in a single Terminal window.

./veild -daemon


Other notes

Using 

--printtoconsole

This is an alternate way to ensure that output gets written to the console (screen) when `daemon` is active, but it should not be necessary if `daemon` has been turned off. This mode defaults to 1 (on) when daemon is not being used.


Using

./veild -importseed

This will  only create a wallet after you give it the seed words that you already have.

If you are just getting started you would not likely already have seed words for restoring a wallet.

See also (for GUI wallet instructions): How to correctly restore wallet from seed words or find lost Veil

See also: