How to get current block number in parity

Question

Parity UI displays current block number at the bottom, but if UI is not enabled, then how do we find the current block number? Can JSONRPC help in finding the current block number? Is it stored somewhere in basepath?

Answer 1

You can get the latest block number over rpc by calling the eth_blockNumber.

Use the following request code:

// Request
curl -X POST --data '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"eth_blockNumber","params":[],"id":83}'

// Result
{
  "id":83,
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "result": "0x4b7" // 1207
}

There are other, higher level APIs that you might be interested in, like web3.js or web3.py. They both allow you to use web3.eth.blockNumber to get the latest block number