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Version: 3.x

Setup

In case you are looking for a guided tutorial directed towards beginners please check out our Smart contract tutorial page.

Rust & Cargo​

A pre-requisite for compiling smart contracts is to have Rust and Cargo installed. Here's an installation guide.

ink! CLI​

The first tool we will be installing is cargo-contract, a CLI tool for helping setting up and managing WebAssembly smart contracts written with ink!.

As a pre-requisite for the tool you need to install the binaryen package, which is used to optimize the WebAssembly bytecode of the contract.

Many package managers have it available nowadays ‒ e.g. there is a package for Debian/Ubuntu, Homebrew and Arch Linux.

If there's only an old version in your distributions package manager you can also download a binary release directly.

After you've installed the package execute:

cargo install cargo-contract --force --locked

Use the --force to ensure you are updated to the most recent cargo-contract version.

You can then use cargo contract --help to start exploring the commands made available to you.

Two other dependencies are needed to lint the ink! contract. This is done to warn users about using e.g. API's in a way that could lead to security issues.

cargo install cargo-dylint dylint-link

Substrate Framework Pre-requisites​

With ink! you can write smart contracts for blockchains built on Substrate.

Follow the official installation steps from the Substrate Developer Hub Knowledge Base to set up all Substrate pre-requisites. Once you have done this you will also need to run:

rustup component add rust-src --toolchain nightly
rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown --toolchain nightly

Installing The Substrate Smart Contracts Node​

The substrate-contracts-node is a simple Substrate blockchain which is configured to include the Substrate module for smart contract functionality ‒ the contracts pallet (see How it Works for more).

It's a comfortable option if you want to get a quickstart. You can download a binary from our releases page (Linux and Mac). Alternatively you can build the node by yourself:

cargo install contracts-node --git https://github.com/paritytech/substrate-contracts-node.git --tag v0.23.0 --force --locked