How to make Bitcoin-Qt client portable? (Windows)

Question

It is a nice project and all, but I think in 2013 it shouldn't be a challenge to save all of an application's files into its own folder (maybe even by default), so you can use it without installing/uninstalling.

I just don't have that much space on drive C. I use drive D for stuff. Is there a solution?

Google just brought me to this discussion which lead to all the fancy alternatives to the original client. I just want to try original Bitcoin-Qt first.

Would no one be interested in a portable Bitcoin-Qt? It would be very useful in my opinion.

Answer 1

1. Put the bitcoin-qt.exe binary in the folder
2. Create a bitcoin.bat file
3. Open the file with notepad
4. Add the following line: bitcoin-qt.exe -datadir=.
5. From now on you can start by double-clicking the bat

Answer 2

Go to https://bitcoin.org/en/download and get Windows zip file (like bitcoin-27.0-win64.zip).

In archive get bin/bitcoin-qt.exe and copy it to your new folder. Only this file is needed.

Make a folder called "data" in your new folder with bitcoin-qt.exe.

In a batch file, develop this code:

.\bitcoin-qt.exe -datadir=.\data

In data folder create folder wallets and move your wallet.dat to this folder.

bitcoin.conf will be located in data folder if you need to add any settings.

For updating get archive from link above and replace bitcoin-qt.exe with new one.