Instructions for setting up a Plinth development enviroment

This repository aims to maintain up-to-date instructions for setting up a Plinth, formerly knows as PlutusTx, development environment. There are three possibilities how to setup the environment:

• Using Nix that provides a shell which contains all dependencies for building Plinth projects.
• Using a docker image, that can be used standalone or integrated with VSCode.
• Using Demeter.run online platform that provides up-to-date development environments for Plinth and other Cardano smart contract languages.

The plinth-template repository references an up-to-date Nix shell and a Docker image that both provide a Plinth development environment for the latest Plutus version.

You can use the instructions provided here to install and configure Nix, VSCode with Docker or Demeter and then set it up with the plinth-template repository.

ℹ️	The plinth-template repository provides an auction demo project. A walkthrough of the code can be found at the official Plutus user guide.

Compiling a project

The cabal tool is used for building and packaging Haskell programs. Before compiling any project you should update the cabal package index with the following command, that tells cabal what packages and versions are available for installation:

cabal update

Once you have set up your developement environment and updated the cabal package index, you can build and run an example project with the following command from the location where the <project_name>.cabal file is located:

cabal run <executable_name>

You can find the executable names in the executable sections of the <project_name>.cabal file. In case there is only one executable name listed you can skip the name and run only cabal run.

The command first builds the project and then runs the executable file defined in the executable section.

ℹ️	In case the project uses Plutus blueprints running the project will generate a blueprint.json file that contains the compiled code of the validators defined in the project.

The following commands perform building and runing a project in two steps:

cabal build <executable_name>
cabal exec <executable_name>

To start a REPL for a project use:

cabal repl