Concordium smart contracts quick start guide#

This guide is intended to be used by experienced developers who want to get up and running quickly with a smart contract deployed on chain with which they can interact.

Before starting, it is a good idea to read the Smart contracts best practices.

Step 1 - Set up developer environment

Download and install the following tools in this order:

  1. rustup

  2. cargo-concordium

  3. concordium-client

For more detailed information, see Install tools for development.

Step 2 - Set up smart contract project

You can choose to start a smart contract project from a template or from scratch.

Tip

Building a DApp as well? Have a look at the DApp starter template!

From a template

To generate smart contracts from the templates, the cargo-generate library is required. To install cargo-generate run the following command:

$cargo install --locked cargo-generate

To start a new Concordium smart contract project from a template, run the command:

$cargo concordium init

The path where the project should be created can be provided with the --path option.

You can use the concordium-std library to help you build smart contracts or build without Rust’s std. To add the library, open Cargo.toml and add the line concordium-std = "*" (preferably, replace the * with the latest version of concordium-std) in the [dependencies] section:

[dependencies] concordium-std = “5.1”

The library documentation is on docs.rs.

For information about building contracts from scratch, see Setting up a smart contract project.

If you’re using the concordium-std library bring everything from the concordium-std library into scope by adding the line:

use concordium_std::*;

For information about developing and editing your smart contracts, see Developing smart contracts.

Step 3 - Set up a Concordium Wallet

You need to set up a Concordium wallet and export the keys to import them to concordium client. You can only import keys from Concordium Wallet for Web or CryptoX Concordium Wallet into concordium-client, so you must choose to set up one of those wallets.

Use the testnet faucet in your wallet to get some CCDs for testing. The testnet faucet is available once you create an account.

Step 4 - Build your smart contract

In order to build a smart contract, run:

$cargo concordium build

This uses Cargo for building, but runs further optimizations on the result. Running the cargo concordium build command will produce a smart contract module which can be found relative to your project root folder in ./target/concordium/wasm32-unknown-unknown/release/my_module.wasm.v1. Alternatively, you can supply the location where to store the smart contract module using the --out option. For example running the following command will output your smart contract module into the root folder of your project in a file name my_module.wasm.v1.

$cargo concordium build --out ./my_module.wasm.v1

Note

For building the schema for a smart contract module, some further preparation is required.

It is also possible to compile using Cargo directly by running:

$cargo build --target=wasm32-unknown-unknown [--release]

Note that even with --release set, the produced Wasm module includes debug information.

Step 5 - Deploy your smart contract

Note

To ease deployment and initialization, you can use the Smart contract deploy and initialize tool instead of the process below. It works with the Concordium Wallet for Web to deploy and initialize smart contracts to Mainnet and Testnet.

To deploy a smart contract module my_module.wasm.v1 using the account with name account-name, run the following command:

$concordium-client module deploy my_module.wasm.v1 --sender account_name

The --sender option can be omitted if the account “default” is to be used.

Modules built with cargo-concordium get a suffix corresponding to the smart contract version, i.e. my_module.wasm.v0 for V0 contracts and my_module.wasm.v1 for V1 contracts.

When deploying a smart contract module built directly with cargo, it is necessary to specify the smart contract version with the --contract-version [v0, v1] option. These module files will not have the version suffix, e.g. .v0, or .v1, but just be called <module_name>.wasm.

If successful, the output should be similar to the following:

Module successfully deployed with reference: 'd121f262f3d34b9737faa5ded2135cf0b994c9c32fe90d7f11fae7cd31441e86'.

Make note of the module reference as it is used when creating smart contract instances.

A module can be given a local alias, or name, which makes referencing it easier. The name is only stored locally by concordium-client, and is not visible on-chain. To add a name during deployment, the --name parameter is used.

$concordium-client module deploy my_module.wasm.v1 --name my_deployed_module

If successful, the output will be similar to the following:

Module successfully deployed with reference: '9eb82a01d96453dbf793acebca0ce25c617f6176bf7a564846240c9a68b15fd2' (my_deployed_module).

For more detailed information about how to deploy a smart contract module, see Deploy a smart contract module, and for information about how to create an instance, see Initialize.

Step 6 - Interact with your smart contract

Since interactions with a smart contract are transactions, make sure to have concordium-client set up with an account with enough CCD to pay for the transactions. The cost of the transaction depends on the size of the parameters sent to the receive function and the complexity of the function itself.

As an example, to update an instance with address index 0 using the parameterless receive function my_receive while allowing up to 10000 energy to be used, run the following command:

$concordium-client contract update 0 --entrypoint my_receive --energy 10000 --sender MyAccount

If successful, the output will be similar to the following:

Successfully updated contract instance {"index":0,"subindex":0} using the entrypoint 'my_receive'.

As you can see, the subindex defaults to 0.

You can also pass parameters, either in JSON or binary format. For more information, see Interact with a smart contract instance.

For information on how to work with parameters in smart contracts, see Work with parameters.

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