Solidity Development: Setting up environment

Nowadays, everything related to crypto-world is becoming more and more popular. Bet you also thought about launching your own successful ICO with million’s investments. Then, as we know, there is no gain without pain. But let’s make development of smart contracts not as painful as it could be. Choosing the right development kit and setting up environment— is a first step to success. In this article we’ll consider the most popular solutions for starting up your decentralized app, such as:

• Remix IDE
• Intellij-Solidity Plugin + Truffle + Ganache
• Solidity Extension for Visual Studio + Blockapps-bloc

New to trading? Try crypto trading bots or copy trading

Remix IDE

Remix — is a web-based IDE for writing, deploying and running Solidity smart contracts. For now, it’s one of the most featured IDE for smart contracts. After opening the Remix website you’ll see something like this:

Remix IDE startup page

Remix offers you out-of-the-box ready solution for decentralized app development. You don’t have to install any plugins or modules, just open the browser and start coding. Everything else is already done for you.

Pros:

• Code highlighting and analysis
• Terminal with integrated JavaScript interpreter and the web3 object
• Running locally stored files
• Ability to run transactions, deploy and compile smart contracts

Cons:

• Works only in web browser
• Clearing of LocalStorage will remove all of your files (there is workaround with using RemixD

Intellij-Solidity Plugin + Truffle + Ganache

Intellij-Solidity — is a plugin for Itnellij-based IDEs such as Webstorm, PhpStorm, PyCharm etc. This plugin offers syntax highlighting, code formatting and autocomplete for Solidity files. Although, it doesn’t provide any solutions for compiling and deploying contracts.

Contract generated by Intellij-Solidity plugin in Webstorm

For compiling and deploying we could use Truffle Framework with Ganache CLI.

Truffle Setup

Firstly, you have to install Truffle globally using npm package manager:

npm install -g truffle

Then you have to create a new directory for your project and go into it (directory has to be empty):

mkdir MyFirstSolidityProject
cd MyFirstSolidityProject/

And the last thing that we have to do for now is to init truffle in our project directory:

truffle init

After initializing truffle in our project directory, we’ll get such files generated:

Project structure generated by Truffle framework

We will discover why do we need these files in the next chapter. For now, we’ll just add some code to our truffle.js file to make it looks like this:

module.exports = {
  networks: {
    development: {
      host: "127.0.0.1",
      port: 7545,
      network_id: "*" // Match any network id
    }
  }
};

Here we specified environment, called development and running on 127.0.0.1:7545. We’ll use it for deploying our contracts to the local Ethereum network.

Ganache CLI Setup

Now we have to install Ganache CLI package globally with npm package manager:

npm install -g ganache-cli

Ganache will run the local instance of Ethereum network on your machine, what may be useful in development and debugging. We have to run ganache on the port specified for our development environment (7545). This could be done by the next command:

ganache-cli -p 7545

After that you’ll see the list of generated test accounts addresses, their private keys and mnemonic phrases for the wallet

Output of running ganache-cli command

Wrap Up

Now we have local network up and running, so we can compile and migrate our project to that network. For doing this, we have to run the following commands:

truffle compile

It’ll generate json file for our contracts under ./build/contracts directory. Then we will migrate this data to the network using development environment:

truffle migrate --network development

Pros:

• Can be used in many modern IDE’s without breaking previous settings
• Supports goto declarations, code completion, syntax highlighting
• Provide file templates for new generated contracts and libraries
• Truffle and Ganache provides a big variety of project setups with React, Redux, Authentication etc

Cons:

• Intellij-Solidity plugin is in alpha stage yet, so it could have some bugs
• A lot of actions has to be done manually for setting up compiling and deployment process

Solidity extension for Visual Studio + Blockapps-bloc

Solidity extension enables smart contract development in Visual Studio IDE. It allows you to start a new project for your decentralized app with everything set up.

Furthermore, this extension requires installing of blockapps-bloc package. This package allow you to run local Ethereum network (like ganache-cli).

Blockapps-bloc Setup

Firstly, we have to go to our project directory and install blockapps-bloc package using npm package manager:

npm install blockapps-bloc

Then we have to initalize this module with name, username and apiUrl on your choice. You’ll be prompted to fill that info after running the following command:

bloc init

After that, let’s install required npm packages and start bloc package:

npm install
bloc start

Now we have server running on default 8000 port. VS extension will use this server by default. You can check or change extension properties in Visual Studio under project properties section:

Pros:

• Ability to setup multi-project applications with ASP.NET or Node.js
• Ready-to-use application templates
• Provides compiling and deploying of smart contracts

Cons:

• Needs some additional packages installation (blockapps-bloc)
• A lot of issues from users, related to expired certificates that could make extension unavailable for some time

Conclusion

All in all, we’ve discovered the most popular solutions for setting up your environment and starting developing smart contracts on Solidity with ease. I hope you’ve found something appropriate to your needs. In the next chapter we’ll write our first smart contract and will deploy it to the local network.

Join Coinmonks Telegram Channel and Youtube Channel get daily Crypto News

Also, Read

• Copy Trading | Crypto Tax Software
• Grid Trading | Crypto Hardware Wallet
• Crypto Telegram Signals | Crypto Trading Bot
• Best Crypto Exchange | Best Crypto Exchange in India
• Best Crypto APIs for Developers
• Best Crypto Lending Platform
• An ultimate guide to Leveraged Token