Setting up the development environment
How to prep up for compiling AppLayer's BDK and running your own blockchain.
Last updated
How to prep up for compiling AppLayer's BDK and running your own blockchain.
Last updated
This subchapter explains how to set up AppLayer's BDK, our open-core blockchain SDK project, to start creating and deploying your contracts in it. This is an overview/"more approachable" version of the project's README.md file - be sure to read it as well.
You're able to tweak almost everything related to the BDK. We offer pre-existing solutions for all of those, but you are free to hack into them as you wish:
Consensus
Block processing
Transaction processing
Contract processing
Communication between nodes, etc.
Head over to the and click the "Fork" button. After that, you can clone your forked repository with git clone and start developing on your own local blockchain.
You can setup the environment in two ways: using Docker, or manually. Manual setup has instructions for APT-based distros (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc.), but other distros should work as long as you have all the dependencies installed.
Using the Docker image is the recommended way to develop on the BDK. It will ensure that you have the correct environment to build and deploy the network, without worrying about dependencies or which host distro you're using.
Fork the project and clone your forked repository:
Then, install Docker on your system (if you don't have it installed already). Instructions can be found at the links below:
Once Docker is installed, go to the root directory of your cloned repository (where the Dockerfile is located), and run the following command:
This will build the image and tag it as bdk-cpp-dev:latest. You can change the tag to whatever you want, but remember to change it at the next step.
After building the image, run a container with the following command:
where:
--name bdk-cpp is an optional label for easier handling of the container (instead of using its ID directly)
$(pwd) or %cd% is the absolute/full path to your repository's folder
:/bdk-volume is the path inside the container where the BDK will be mounted. This volume is synced with the bdk-cpp folder inside the container
The -p flags expose the ports used by the nodes - the example exposes the default ports 8080-8099 and 8110-8111, if you happen to use different ports, change them accordingly
When running the container, you will be logged in as the root user and will be able to develop, build and deploy the network within the container. Remember that we are using our local repo as a volume, so every change in the local folder will be reflected to the container in real time, and vice-versa (so you can develop outside and use the container only for build and deploy). You can also integrate the container with your favorite IDE or editor.
After editing the docker-compose.yml file, right-click on it and select Compose Up to build and run the container so you can start developing on it. Click on the Docker extension icon on the left side of the VSCode window and you will see the container running. You can also right-click on the container and select Attach Shell to open a terminal on the container.
You can follow these steps to build the BDK in your own system. Dependencies are divided logically into toolchain binaries and libraries:
Toolchain binaries:
git
GCC with support for C++23 or higher
Make
CMake 3.19.0 or higher
Protobuf (protoc + grpc_cpp_plugin)
tmux (for deploying)
(optional) ninja if you prefer it over make
(optional) mold if you prefer it over ld
(optional) doxygen for generating docs
(optional) clang-tidy for linting
Libraries:
Boost 1.83 or higher (components: chrono, filesystem, program-options, system, thread, nowide)
OpenSSL 1.1.1 / libssl 1.1.1 or higher
libzstd
CryptoPP 8.2.0 or higher
libscrypt
libc-ares
gRPC (libgrpc and libgrpc++)
secp256k1
ethash + keccak
EVMOne + EVMC
Speedb
The versions of those dependencies should suffice out-of-the-box for at least the following distros (or greater, including their derivatives):
Debian 13 (Trixie)
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat)
Linux Mint 22 (Wilma)
Fedora 40
Any rolling release distro from around May 2024 onwards (check their repos to be sure)
There is a script called scripts/deps.sh which you can use to check if you have those dependencies installed (deps.sh --check), install them in case you don't (deps.sh --install), and clean up the external ones for reinstalling (deps.sh --cleanext). The script expects dependencies to be installed either on /usr or /usr/local, giving preference to the latter if it finds anything there (so you can use a higher version of a dependency while still keeping your distro's default one).
Please note that installing most dependencies through the script only works on APT-based distros (Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives) - you can still check the dependencies on any distro and install the few ones labeled as "external" (those are fetched through git), but if you're on a distro with another package manager and/or a distro older than one of the minimum ones listed above, you're on your own.
For Debian specifically, you can (and should) use update-alternatives to register and set your GCC version to a more up-to-date build if required.
If you're using a self-compiled GCC build out of the system path (e.g. --prefix=/usr/local/gcc-X.Y.Z instead of --prefix=/usr/local), don't forget to export its installation paths in your PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH env vars (to prevent e.g. "version GLIBCXX_...'/CXXABI_...not found" errors). Put something like this in your~/.bashrc` file for example, changing the version accordingly to whichever one you have installed:
After forking the project, you can now setup your own local testnet. This is strongly recommended, as it will ensure your environment is properly setup and that you are able to compile the project with your contracts in it.
Clone your forked repository by following the steps below:
After cloning, the following commands will build the project within the folder which scripts/AIO-setup.sh (a script that automatically deploys a local testnet) will use later.
Adjust -j$(nproc) accordingly to your system if necessary, as some parts of the project can get really heavy RAM-wise during compilation.
After building, you can optionally run a test bench with the following command: ./src/bins/bdkd-tests/bdkd-tests -d yes (the -d yes parameter will give a verbose output).
You can also use filter tags to test specific parts of the project (e.g. ./src/bins/bdkd-tests/bdkd-tests -d yes [utils] will test all the components inside the src/utils folder, [utils][tx] will test only the transaction-related components inside utils, etc.). You can check all the available tags by doing a grep -rw "\"\[.*\]\"" in the tests subfolder.
Currently there are two ways to deploy an AppLayer node: dockerized and manual. Go back to the project's root folder and check the scripts subfolder - there are two main scripts there used for deploying the node. You can pick whichever one you prefer, depending on your needs.
You can deploy a node using Docker by running ./scripts/auto.sh. Make sure you have both docker and docker-compose installed, as the script requires both to work. The script itself accepts several parameters. Running ./scripts/auto.sh help will give you more info on each parameter.
To manually deploy a node, run ./scripts/AIO-setup.sh. Make sure tmux is installed, as the script needs it to work. The script will create two folders at the project's root - build_local_testnet and local_testnet - and build and deploy a fresh new instance of a local testnet.
Running the script again will stop the testnet, rebuild it, replace it and restart it on the spot. If you wish to manually stop the testnet for some reason, run tmux kill-server. You can also read the script to find out the specific names of the tmux sessions to manually restart or stop accordingly.
You can use the following flags when calling the manual script to customize deployment:
--clean
Clean the build folder before building
false
--no-deploy
Only build the project, don't deploy the network
false
--debug=<bool>
Build in debug mode
true
--cores=<int>
Number of cores to use for building
Maximum available
As an example, ./scripts/AIO-setup.sh --clean --no-deploy --debug=false --cores=4 will clean the build folder, only build the project, build in release mode and use 4 cores for building. Remember that GCC uses around 1.5GB of RAM per core, so we recommend adjusting the number of cores according to the available RAM on your system for more stability.
As an example, here's how to configure MetaMask to connect to your local testnet:
Network Name
AppLayer Local Testnet
New RPC URL
Chain ID
808080
Currency Symbol
APPL
Once you're connected, import the following private key for the chain owner account: 0xe89ef6409c467285bcae9f80ab1cfeb3487cfe61ab28fb7d36443e1daa0c2867. This account contains 1000 APPL Tokens from the get go and is able to call the ContractManager contract. Other details about the deployed testnet chain can be found in the project's README.md file.
To integrate the container with VSCode, you need to install the and configure it to use the container. After installing it, there is a docker-compose.yml file on the root of the repository that you can use to build and run the container. The only thing that you need to do is to change the volumes section to point to your local SDK folder:
Note that, when re-deploying, if your wallet or RPC client keeps track of account nonce data, you must reset it as a network reset would set back their nonces to 0. .
After deploying your node, you can configure and connect your preferred Web3 client/frontend to the network. We recommend using as it is the most popular one, but you're free to use any other client you wish.
