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Version: 4.x

Setup

In case you are looking for a guided tutorial directed towards beginners please check out our Guided Tutorial.

Rust & Cargo

A pre-requisite for compiling smart contracts is to have a stable Rust version 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!.

You can find it here on GitHub and here on crates.io.

The tool has a number of handy capabilities:

$ cargo contract       
Utilities to develop Wasm smart contracts

Usage: cargo contract <COMMAND>

Commands:
new Setup and create a new smart contract project
build Compiles the contract, generates metadata, bundles both together in a `<name>.contract` file
check Check that the code builds as Wasm; does not output any `<name>.contract` artifact to the `target/` directory
test Test the smart contract off-chain
upload Upload contract code
instantiate Instantiate a contract
call Call a contract
decode Decodes a contracts input or output data (supplied in hex-encoding)
help Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
-h, --help Print help information
-V, --version Print version information

Installation

Please see the installation instructions in the cargo-contract repository here.

If everything worked, cargo contract --help should show you the above list of available commands.

Installing substrate-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.

There are two ways of installing the node:

(1) Download the Binary

This is the recommended method, you can download a binary from our releases page (Linux and Mac).

(2) Build it yourself

Alternatively you can build the node by yourself. This can take quite a while though!

cargo install contracts-node