Start Developing on Plutus

Plutus is a smart contract platform that allows you to develop dApps on the Cardano blockchain.

Setting up your development environment for Plutus takes a bit of time. Follow instructions in the Plutus Starter Project Template to set it up.

In this repo, I only include things that aren't obvious from the official Plutus documentation. There are also quick reference links at the end of the README.

Haskell Development Environment

GHC

The Plutus Starter Project Template uses Cabal and relies on a global GHC setup. As a Haskell Stack user, I really don't like having global compiler/tool installations. They quickly get out of date and can causes issues if your various projects use different versions of GHC. Use the following instruction to set up GHC unless your project uses Stack.

GHCUP

The quickest way to get started is to follow these instructions to install GHC: https://www.haskell.org/ghcup/ Install ghcup:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://get-ghcup.haskell.org | sh

Then install GHC, e.g. ver 8.10.7:

ghcup install ghc 8.10.7
ghcup set ghc 8.10.7

Stack

Or if you are a Stack user like me,

• install Stack, on OSX,

  brew install haskell-stack
  

• install ghc

  stack install ghc

• Put ~/.stack/programs/x86_64-osx/ghc-<your-version>/bin/ into your shell's $PATH, so that GHC can be found when you do cabal install in your Cabal project. If you are unsure of your compiler path, run stack path | grep compiler-exe to find out.

IDE Setup

Refer to my Haskell IDE Setup repo for instructions on various editors/IDEs, including VSCode, VIM, Spacemacs and Atom (no longer updated).

Local Plutus Playground

Plutus offers an online playground for you to test your smart contracts, however you may want to run the Plutus Playground locally. To do that, you'll need:

• matching Plutus version
• Nix shell
• plutus playground server

Matching Plutus Version

You need to make sure the plutus-apps repo hash specified in your project's project.cabal matches your local plutus-apps repo checkout.

For example, if you have this in your project.cabal,

source-repository-package
  type: git
  location: https://github.com/input-output-hk/plutus-apps.git
  subdir:
    ...
    ...
  tag: ea0ca4e9f9821a9dbfc5255fa0f42b6f2b3887c4

make sure tag matches your local plutus-apps's git hash (use git log -n1 to check). If they don't match, simply go to your plutus-apps repo and do git checkout <hash>.

Install Nix on OSX

On Nix website, it suggests this command to install Nix:

curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh

However, this won't work if you are on the latest OSX version. Use the following instead:

sh <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install) --darwin-use-unencrypted-nix-store-volume

Plutus Playground

Before running any of the following commands, make sure you've set up IOHK's binary cache.

In your local plutus-apps checkout,

1. start a nix shell. If this is your first time running nix-shell, give it some time to pull down and install dependencies. This can take quite a while.

   nix-shell

   and run:

   cd plutus-playground-client && plutus-playground-server

2. in a new nix-shell, run:

   cd plutus-playground-client && npm start

3. go to http://localhost:8009 to visit your local Plutus playground.

Local Plutus Docs

In your local plutus-apps checkout, enter a nix-shell, then run:

build-and-serve-docs

then view

• general Pluts and Marlowe docs at http://localhost:8002/,
• Plutus API docs at http://localhost:8002/haddock

Q&A

If you have trouble downloading purty while building Plutus on OSX, and are getting something like this:

curl: (22) The requested URL returned error: 403 Forbidden
error: cannot download download_file?file_path=purty-6.2.0-osx.tar.gz from any mirror

do the following:

sudo mkdir /etc/nix
sudo touch /etc/nix/nix.conf

and put the following two lines in the file you just created:

substituters        = https://hydra.iohk.io https://iohk.cachix.org https://cache.nixos.org/
trusted-public-keys = hydra.iohk.io:f/Ea+s+dFdN+3Y/G+FDgSq+a5NEWhJGzdjvKNGv0/EQ= iohk.cachix.org-1:DpRUyj7h7V830dp/i6Nti+NEO2/nhblbov/8MW7Rqoo= cache.nixos.org-1:6NCHdD59X431o0gWypbMrAURkbJ16ZPMQFGspcDShjY=

I suggest doing this before you start the build. It will make your life much easier.

Resources

Alonzo Testnet Exercises

Architecture Diagrams

[Plutus Official Docs] - start from here

Plutus Community Docs - amazing community docs. If you have trouble setting up your dev env, whatever your system is, be sure to look here first.

Plutus Core

plutus-apps

Online Plutus Playground

Plutus Pioneer Program videos - comprehensive intro to Plutus

Plutus Pioneer Program Code

Plutus Starter Project Template - start a new project from here

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good: original, remastered and interactive notebook

Haskell & Cryptocurrencies course Mongolia