Installation Guide

This page will guide you through the steps needed to prepare a computer for development with the Substrate Node Template. Since Substrate is built with the Rust programming language, the first thing you will need to do is prepare the computer for Rust development - these steps will vary based on the computer's operating system. Once Rust is configured, you will use its toolchains to interact with Rust projects; the commands for Rust's toolchains will be the same for all supported, Unix-based operating systems.

Unix-Based Operating Systems

Substrate development is easiest on Unix-based operating systems like macOS or Linux. The examples in the Substrate Tutorials and Recipes use Unix-style terminals to demonstrate how to interact with Substrate from the command line.

macOS

Open the Terminal application and execute the following commands:

# Install Homebrew if necessary https://brew.sh/
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"

# Make sure Homebrew is up-to-date, install openssl and cmake
brew update
brew install openssl cmake

Ubuntu/Debian

Use a terminal shell to execute the following commands:

sudo apt update
# May prompt for location information
sudo apt install -y cmake pkg-config libssl-dev git build-essential clang libclang-dev curl

Arch Linux

Run these commands from a terminal:

pacman -Syu --needed --noconfirm cmake gcc openssl-1.0 pkgconf git clang
export OPENSSL_LIB_DIR="/usr/lib/openssl-1.0"
export OPENSSL_INCLUDE_DIR="/usr/include/openssl-1.0"

Fedora/RHEL/CentOS

Use a terminal to run the following commands:

# Update
sudo dnf update
# Install packages
sudo dnf install cmake pkgconfig rocksdb rocksdb-devel llvm git libcurl libcurl-devel curl-devel clang

Windows

For Windows please follow the guide mentioned here

Rust Developer Environment

This project uses rustup to help manage the Rust toolchain. First install and configure rustup:

# Install
curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
# Configure
source ~/.cargo/env

Finally, configure the Rust toolchain:

rustup default stable
rustup update nightly
rustup update stable
rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown --toolchain nightly

This completes your Rust Installation and Setup.

Substrate Node Template

Let's follow the next steps by First cloning the Substrate_node_template

git clone -b latest --depth 1 https://github.com/substrate-developer-hub/substrate-node-template

cd substrate-node-template

cargo build --release

Getting Started

Follow the steps below to get started with the Node Template, or get it up and running right from your browser in just a few clicks using Playground 🛠️

Run

Use Rust's native cargo command to build and launch the template node:

cargo run --release -- --dev --tmp

Build

The cargo run command will perform an initial build. Use the following command to build the node without launching it:

cargo build --release

Embedded Docs

Once the project has been built, the following command can be used to explore all parameters and subcommands:

./target/release/node-template -h

Run

The provided cargo run command will launch a temporary node and its state will be discarded after you terminate the process. After the project has been built, there are other ways to launch the node.

Single-Node Development Chain

This command will start the single-node development chain with persistent state:

./target/release/node-template --dev

Purge the development chain's state:

./target/release/node-template purge-chain --dev

Start the development chain with detailed logging:

RUST_BACKTRACE=1 ./target/release/node-template -ldebug --dev

Connect with Polkadot-JS Apps Front-end

Once the node template is running locally, you can connect it with Polkadot-JS Apps front-end to interact with your chain. Click here connecting the Apps to your local node template.

Template Structure

A Substrate project such as this consists of a number of components that are spread across a few directories.

Node

A blockchain node is an application that allows users to participate in a blockchain network. Substrate-based blockchain nodes expose a number of capabilities:

• Networking: Substrate nodes use the libp2p networking stack to allow the nodes in the network to communicate with one another.
• Consensus: Blockchains must have a way to come to consensus on the state of the network. Substrate makes it possible to supply custom consensus engines and also ships with several consensus mechanisms that have been built on top of Web3 Foundation research.
• RPC Server: A remote procedure call (RPC) server is used to interact with Substrate nodes.

There are several files in the node directory - take special note of the following:

• chain_spec.rs: A chain specification is a source code file that defines a Substrate chain's initial (genesis) state. Chain specifications are useful for development and testing, and critical when architecting the launch of a production chain. Take note of the development_config and testnet_genesis functions, which are used to define the genesis state for the local development chain configuration. These functions identify some well-known accounts and use them to configure the blockchain's initial state.
• service.rs: This file defines the node implementation. Take note of the libraries that this file imports and the names of the functions it invokes. In particular, there are references to consensus-related topics, such as the longest chain rule, the Aura block authoring mechanism and the GRANDPA finality gadget.

After the node has been built, refer to the embedded documentation to learn more about the capabilities and configuration parameters that it exposes:

./target/release/node-template --help

Runtime

In Substrate, the terms "runtime" and "state transition function" are analogous - they refer to the core logic of the blockchain that is responsible for validating blocks and executing the state changes they define. The Substrate project in this repository uses the FRAME framework to construct a blockchain runtime. FRAME allows runtime developers to declare domain-specific logic in modules called "pallets". At the heart of FRAME is a helpful macro language that makes it easy to create pallets and flexibly compose them to create blockchains that can address a variety of needs.

Review the FRAME runtime implementation included in this template and note the following:

• This file configures several pallets to include in the runtime. Each pallet configuration is defined by a code block that begins with impl $PALLET_NAME::Config for Runtime.
• The pallets are composed into a single runtime by way of the construct_runtime! macro, which is part of the core FRAME Support library.

Pallets

The runtime in this project is constructed using many FRAME pallets that ship with the core Substrate repository and a template pallet that is defined in the pallets directory.

A FRAME pallet is compromised of a number of blockchain primitives:

• Storage: FRAME defines a rich set of powerful storage abstractions that makes it easy to use Substrate's efficient key-value database to manage the evolving state of a blockchain.
• Dispatchables: FRAME pallets define special types of functions that can be invoked (dispatched) from outside of the runtime in order to update its state.
• Events: Substrate uses events to notify users of important changes in the runtime.
• Errors: When a dispatchable fails, it returns an error.
• Config: The Config configuration interface is used to define the types and parameters upon which a FRAME pallet depends.

Run in Docker

First, install Docker and Docker Compose.

Then run the following command to start a single node development chain.

./scripts/docker_run.sh

This command will firstly compile your code, and then start a local development network. You can also replace the default command (cargo build --release && ./target/release/node-template --dev --ws-external) by appending your own. A few useful ones are as follow.

# Run Substrate node without re-compiling
./scripts/docker_run.sh ./target/release/node-template --dev --ws-external

# Purge the local dev chain
./scripts/docker_run.sh ./target/release/node-template purge-chain --dev

# Check whether the code is compilable
./scripts/docker_run.sh cargo check