Home>Solana Cookbook>Accounts

How to Create an Account

Creating an account requires using the System Program createAccount instruction. The Solana runtime will grant the owner of an account, access to write to its data or transfer lamports. When creating an account, we have to preallocate a fixed storage space in bytes (space) and enough lamports to cover the rent.

create-account.ts

import {
  SystemProgram,
  Keypair,
  Transaction,
  sendAndConfirmTransaction,
  Connection,
  clusterApiUrl,
  LAMPORTS_PER_SOL,
} from "@solana/web3.js";
 
(async () => {
  const connection = new Connection(clusterApiUrl("devnet"), "confirmed");
  const fromPubkey = Keypair.generate();
 
  // Airdrop SOL for transferring lamports to the created account
  const airdropSignature = await connection.requestAirdrop(
    fromPubkey.publicKey,
    LAMPORTS_PER_SOL,
  );
  await connection.confirmTransaction(airdropSignature);
 
  // amount of space to reserve for the account
  const space = 0;
 
  // Seed the created account with lamports for rent exemption
  const rentExemptionAmount =
    await connection.getMinimumBalanceForRentExemption(space);
 
  const newAccountPubkey = Keypair.generate();
  const createAccountParams = {
    fromPubkey: fromPubkey.publicKey,
    newAccountPubkey: newAccountPubkey.publicKey,
    lamports: rentExemptionAmount,
    space,
    programId: SystemProgram.programId,
  };
 
  const createAccountTransaction = new Transaction().add(
    SystemProgram.createAccount(createAccountParams),
  );
 
  await sendAndConfirmTransaction(connection, createAccountTransaction, [
    fromPubkey,
    newAccountPubkey,
  ]);
})();