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Version: 5.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