Solidity Workshop Guide - Pocked Edition 📙

Do you want to have a quick run-through on how to setup a Solidity project?

This is a written guide accompanying an actual workshop I held last week. Follow along with the code - https://github.com/petarjs/solidity-workshop-nis.

We created a decentralized app for asking and answering questions. In a moment of pure creativity we named it "Dask" (Decentralized Ask) 🤣😇 Think of it as a nano version of Quora where people pay you Ether to answer a question.

Required softweare

To follow this guide you'll need to install the following:

NodeJS & npm
Truffle
Metamask

Creating the project

Create the directory where your project will live, and then initialize the project using Truffle:

mkdir solidity-workshop
cd solidity-workshop
truffle init

After that, you'll see that Truffle generated a bunch of files and folders, that we'll use to develop the project.

Configuring the project

We need to configure the project to tell Truffle how to connect to the blockchain. While developing, we'll use Truffle's built in Ethereum blockchain simulation. To deploy your contracts to a testnet or the mainnet later, just add the required configuration entries.

The configuration for UNIX based systems is held in truffle.js, and for Windows please use truffle-config.js.

Add this to your configuration file:

module.exports = {
  networks: {
    development: {
      host: "127.0.0.1",
      port: 9545,
      network_id: "*"
    }
  }
}

Creating the contract

Now, in your contracts directory, create a file named Dask.sol. Here we'll write our code.

Find the code at https://github.com/petarjs/solidity-workshop-nis

Compiling

To compile your solidity contracts, use this command:

truffle compile

Migrations

Migrations are files that define how your contracts will be deployed to blockchain. They live in the migrations folder. You can just copy-paste the already provided 1_initial_migration.js and change the code to match your contract's name.

To migrate your contracts to the blockchain, there are a few prerequisites:

You compiled your contracts.
You have the blockchain network defined in the truffle.js running.

To start Truffle's test blockchain, just run:

truffle develop

This command needs to continue running for as long you're developing, so it's best to run it in a new terminal window.

Now that we have the test blockchain running, we can migrate the contracts by executing:

truffle migrate

This command uses the development config from truffle.js. If you want to migrate to a different network, you can specify that using the --network argument (e.g. truffle migrate --network ropsten).

Interact with the blockchain

When you ran truffle develop, it generated some acconuts for you, and preloaded them with some ether, so you don't need to worry about that. Ether is required for sending transactions and calling smart contract methods that modify the contract's state.

Inside the console, you can query and modify the blockchain state by using the web3 object. For example, to find out how many weis there are in one ether, run:

web3.toWei(1, 'ether')

All the accounts that Truffle generated for us are stored in web3.eth.accounts. For example, to find out how much ether the first account has, run:

web3.eth.getBalance(web3.eth.accounts[0])

Transfering ether

Let's say we wanted to transfer 2 ether from the first to the second account. First, let's find out how much ether each has.

web3.eth.getBalance(web3.eth.accounts[0])
web3.eth.getBalance(web3.eth.accounts[1])

We see that they each have 1000000 ether.

To make the transaction, we'll use the web3.eth.sendTransaction method.

web3.eth.sendTransaction({
    from: web3.eth.accounts[0],
    to: web3.eth.accounts[1],
    value: web3.toWei(2, 'ether')
})

Now if we check how much each account has, we'll see it changed.

Calling methods on our smart contract

First, we need to obtain a reference to our deployed contract. We do that by executing:

let dask
Dask.deployed().then(d => dask = d)

After that, we'll have the contract in dask variable, and will be able to interact with it. For example, we might want to know the price per answer:

dask.getPricePerAnswer()

Interacting with our smart contract from JavaScript

To interact with the blockchain from our webpage, we'll use the web3 library. Instead of importing the lib ourselves, we'll install the Metamask Chrome extension which will inject the web3 object into our webpage. By doing this we can call methods on the blockchain, like transfering ether and getting address balances.

But to interact with our smart contract, we need to let web3 know how to talk to it. We do this by providing an ABI of our smart contract to web3. ABI (application binary interface) is simply a JSON representation of our smart contract's interface (a list of methods, arguments, types...). To see how an ABI looks, we can look into our build/contracts/ folder. If we open Dask.json, among other properties, we'll see the abi property. We want to copy this and paste it into our webpage.

The second thing we need is the address to which our smart contract is deployed on the blockchain. We can get this by typing the following into the truffle develop console:

Dask.deployed()

In the output you'll see an address property. Copy this too and paste into the webpage.

Now, it's finally time to instantiate our contract and be able to call its methods from JavaScript. We do this by:

let daskContract = web3.eth.contract(abi).at(address)

Interacting with JavaScript, advanced

We'll talk more about web3 in the second part of the guide. We'll explain how to call methods, what events are and how to use them to your advantage.

Deploying to Ropsten testnet

After finishing the smart contract in the local development environment, we should deploy it to the Ropsten Testnet.

To deploy a Smart Contract to the Ropsten network, we have to have Ether to pay for Gas (fees for the deployment). Following are the steps to get free Ether:

Click Metamask on Chrome, select Testnet - Ropsten.
Create a new account on Ropsten Network.
To get free Ether, we click BUY button from the account screen
Click ROPSTEN TEST FAUCET to go site https://faucet.metamask.io/.
On the site, we click the button "Request 1 ether from faucet".
Waiting a bit, and you'll have 1 Ether in our account!

Now it's time to configure Truffle to be able to deploy to Ropsten.

Install the truffle-hdwallet-provider npm package by running the following command in the terminal:

npm i --save truffle-hdwallet-provider

Next, find out your Metamask seed phrase (Metamask -> Settings -> Reveal Seed Words) and copy it into a variable on top of truffle.js:

const mnemonic = 'crowd party laugh address sheriff fix trend pen present boost oil castle'

Add a new network in the configuration object in truffle.js:

    ropsten:  {
      network_id: 3,
      provider: function() {
        return new HDWalletProvider(mnemonic, `https://ropsten.infura.io`)
      },
      gas: 3712388
    }

Finally, run the migrate command in the terminal, specifying the network:

truffle migrate --network=ropsten

Thanks

That's it! Thank you for following along. Solidity and Web3 are really fun and exciting technologies. Be aware that they are still Beta software and as such there isn't much learning materials or documentation online. Encountering bugs is totally common, and if you stumble upon one that you can't solve on your own (by browsing StackOverflow), feel free to post a question in the comments! I'd love to help out.

And if you'd like to read a Part 2 explaining JavaScript interaction in more detail, let me know!

Cheers! 🎉🎉🎉