How to get a wallet address and set label via RPC?

Question

I'm familiar with the basic RPC commands, but I'm having trouble retrieving/adding an address to a wallet, using purely RPC calls (i.e. bitcoind only, not bitcoin-qt).

My understanding is that addresses are associated with accounts, but I'm unsure what role "accounts" play, and how to create new ones etc.

In pseudocode, this is what I want to be able to do:

if (count(getAddressesByLabel("donations")) == 0) {
    address = wallet.createBitcoinAddress();
    address.setLabel("donations");
}

donationAddress = getAddressesByLabel("donations"))

Answer 1

You may have already read this, but make sure you read this if you want to know about how the accounts feature of the core client works: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Accounts_explained. (It's somewhat of a legacy feature.)

Are you looking to be able to do this manually with the RPC methods, or automated?

For manually, do:

bitcoin-cli getaddressesbyaccount "donations"

If the JSON array returned is empty, then no address is associated. To create a new bitcoin address with that label, do:

bitcoin-cli getnewaddress "donations"

To get an address for the "donations" account, do:

bitcoin-cli getaccountaddress "donations"