Windows environment setup with Solidity

English In this lecture, we are going to set up our development environment for Windows with all the tools that we need to develop smart contracts for Ethereum. We're not going to describe all of them but focus on those that are widely used by the community. By the way, this lecture is specifically for Windows. If you are running on MacOS or Linux there are dedicated lessons for that. Our toolbox will be composed of the following tools: Geth, Ganache, Truffle and Atom. The first thing we need to install is Geth. Now Geth or Go-Ethereum is the command line interface that allows you to run and operate a full Ethereum node. Geth is implemented in Go and allows you to mine blocks, to generate ether, to deploy and interact with smart contracts, to transfer funds, to inspect block history, to create accounts, and so on and so forth. Geth can be used to connect to the public Ethereum networks like the main net, or to create your own private network for development purposes, which wel'll demonstrate later on in this course. The benefit of using Geth in your development process is to let you fully test your application before deploying it to the main net. So the installer for Geth can be found on the Ethereum website. So we open our browser. By the way, if you're only using Edge or Internet Explorer as a browser, you should install either Chrome, which is the main one we use, or at least Firefox. But Edge and Internet Explorer are not going to be suitable for blockchain testing. So here I will go to "ethereum.github.io" By the way, all the websites I mention in these videos, I will always put the links in the resources of the corresponding lectures. So "go-ethereum/downloads". So here we can go to Geth 1.7.3 for Windows. Once it is downloaded you can just open it, accept the security warning, and then it will run the installation wizard. So here I agree, don't forget to check the development tools checkbox here in this step, this is important. And once it's done, you can click Next, you leave it in the default directory and it's installing everything. When it's done, you can close it. Now throughout this course we're gonna do a lot of things on the command line. And in Windows you have 2 command line interfaces by default: you have the CMD runtime, and you have the PowerShell. Now we really strongly advise you to use the PowerShell, because it's more powerful and its commands are way closer to what you may get on other UNIX systems. So here we will start a PowerShell by going to the search and looking for Windows PowerShell. And by the way, once it's running, it might help to right-click it in the in the bar, and click "pin to taskbar". This way we can easily go back to it when we need to. And this is the command line interface that you should use. And here for example you can type"geth version" to check which version of Geth is installed. And here we have1.7.3-stable, and that's good. We can close PowerShell for now, and go back to the browser to install Ganache. Now ganache is an Ethereum blockchain emulator that you can use for development purposes. Ganache can be seen as a replacement for TestRPC, which we used in previous versions of this course. The strength of Ganache is its UI that allows you to inspect blocks and transactions in a more user-friendly way. Compared to Geth, Ganache is an in-memory Ethereum node that runs faster and provides all the visual components you need to test your contracts locally before deploying them to a real Ethereum implementation. Now we can install Ganache by downloading the installation package for windows on "truffleframework.com/ganache". Again I'll put this link in the resources of this course. So here the website should detect automatically which operating system I'm on, and propose me to download the Windows version which I'm gonna do. So I click the download button on the home page and once it's downloaded I just open the .APPX package, and after a while I get the security warning. I still open it and I get to this screen so I just click install leaving the "launch when ready" checkbox checked. Once installation is complete, you will see this screen that asks you to support Ganache by enabling Analytics. You should leave it like that, and click "Continue". Now let's review the main features of Ganache. When you start Ganache, it starts a new Ethereum node in memory on network identifier 5777, which we can see in this part of the screen. It also creates 10 accounts and puts 100 Ethers on each account. Now contrary to what happened with TestRPC, Ganache always creates the same accounts, it uses the same mnemonic, which will be very practical later on when we import those accounts in MetaMask. So the first screen you see is the "Accounts" view, and there you can find some information about the running node like the current block, which is the number of the last block mined by the node, the gas price, which is the minimum gas price this node requires on transactions in order to mine them, the gas limit, which is the maximum gas this node is willing to accept per block, the network identifier, the RPC server is the endpoint for the RPC parts that we'll connect to later, and the mining status is important. By default, this fake node only mines a new block when it receives a new transaction. That's what Auto-mining means. And this is completely different from what real nodes would do, since a normal node would mine a new block at regular intervals, whether there are pending transactions or not. You can disable auto-mining, come back to a more normal behavior and even set a mining block time in the settings. And last but not least, you can see the mnemonic, which is the seed that Ganache uses to generate the first accounts. Then you can see a list of the 10 accounts generated by Ganache, with the following information: the address of the account, its balance, with only two decimals, the number of transactions that were sent by this account, the index of the account in the list of accounts, and finally a button that makes it possible for you to see the private key for the account. Second you have the "Blocks" tab, that shows you a list of blocks mined by the node, and here we only have one block, which is the genesis block. We also have the "Transactions" tab where we will see a list of all the transactions, and for now there aren't any. And last but not least, the "Logs" tab, that shows you the logs of the running node. There's also search field, where you can search for blocks or transactions by their hash or number. And finally there's this cog icon that accesses settings. There you can change the hostname, the port number, the network identifier - we'll use that quite a lot later on - you can also disable auto- mining to set a regular mining block time. we'll leave auto-mining on. In "Accounts and keys", you can define the number of accounts that are generated when it starts, and also change the mnemonic or generate a random one. Here, we'll leave the settings as they are. In "Chain", you can customize the gas limit and the gas price, and finally in "Advanced", you can enable or disable Google Analytics. Whenever you change something in the settings, don't forget to save and restart to take those new settings into account. Here we'll just go back. Now we can quit Ganache for now. And the next thing we need to install is NodeJS and NPM. NodeJS is a server-side JavaScript platform to create applications that will interact with your Ethereum node. When we install NodeJS, we also install the Node Package Manager, or NPM, that is required to set up most of the tools and libraries that are needed to develop for Ethereum. To check if NodeJS and NPM are already installed on your machine, you can use the following commands in a Windows PowerShell. So let's open the PowerShell and "node -v" to show the version that is installed for Node if any, and in this case we don't have any, and "npm -v" will show us the version for NPM. And here is the same: none is installed. So if you already have a version installed, make sure that NodeJS is at least in version 8 and NPM is at least in version 5. Those are the versions that we tested to produce this content and if you use older versions, it might not work. NodeJS can be installed in different ways, but the easiest way to install is the MSI installation package, that you can find on the NodeJS website. So let's quit PowerShell for now, go back to the browser and go to "nodejs.org". Again the link will be in the description. And here, we'll use the "9.3.0 Current", and not the LTS one. Once the package is downloaded, we can simply run the installation wizard. I'll quit the Chrome browser for now, just to see better. So I just click Next, I accept the terms of the license agreement. Next I leave the default location for installation. Next I leave all the defaults as they are, and then I click "Install". I will allow this app to make changes to my device and then I click "Finish". Now I can go back to a new PowerShell. If it was already running, you should quit it and come back, start a new one to make sure that everything is in sync. And then you can type "node -v" again and "npm -v". Again these are the versions with which we tested all our content, so make sure that you have these versions at least. The next thing we need to install is Truffle 4. Now to compile, test and deploy your smart contracts, you will need a build framework that will increase your development velocity compared to doing it manually. And we will demonstrate that fact later on in this course. Here we will demonstrate the use of Truffle 4, and we can find Truffle on the website where we also found Ganache earlier: "truffleframework.com". Now if you have a previous version of Truffle, please uninstall it. If you have Truffle 3, that we used in previous versions of this course, you should remove it before installing the new version, otherwise they will collide. And to install Truffle, we will install it as a Node package. So we can go to the PowerShell. First of all let's uninstall any potential older version that we might have: "npm uninstall -g truffle" and then "npm install -g truffle", but we will add a version here "@4.0.4". This is because we don't want to install the latest version that might introduce some breaking changes with the code of this course. So if you are using a more recent version, especially a more recent major version, don't be surprised if you've got issues. Here, 4.0.4 is really the latest version at the time of this recording. Once this is done, you can run "truffle version" to check that the command exists and that it's in the right version. And here you can see we have 4.0.4 for Truffle, and we have 0.4.18 for the Solidity compiler, implemented in JavaScript. The last step of this lecture is to install a text editor, that will be used to edit our smart contracts and other text files. At this point in time we don't really have a real Ethereum IDE. You can find some plugins for IntelliJ, Webstorm or Microsoft Visual Studio, but not a full IDE covering all the development chain. But that's okay because we have some interesting free text editors that are good enough for what we want to show here. In this course, we chose to use Atom because it's freely available for Mac, Windows and Linux. But of course, you are free to use the one that you are more familiar with. To install Atom, we can first quit the PowerShell and go to "github.com/atom/atom". There we can go to "Releases" here. And we will not install the 1.24 beta. Instead we'll stick with the latest stable release, which in our case is 1.23.2. It might be more recent for you, but at the time of this recording this is what we have. And here we would use the atom-setup executable. And since we are running on a 64-bit machine, we'll use "atom-setup-x64.exe". Once the package is downloaded, you can simply open it. Here we'll quit the browser. So this package installs Atom and it launches it when installation is done, and also creates a shortcut on our desktop, which will be very practical to launch Atom later on. So here is Atom. We'll accept the registration as a default handler for the Atom protocol: "yes, always". And this should also have installed all the atom and apm commands that we need in the PowerShell. So now if you want, you can leave Atom, go back to the PowerShell, and run "atom -v" to see the version that is installed. And "apm -v" to see the Atom Package Manager version. So the Atom Package Manager is very useful to install extensions and plugins for the Atom text editor. And in this case we'll use it to install the language-ethereum extension, that adds support for the Solidity language, that we'll use to write our smart contracts. So to install it we can just run "apm install language-ethereum". We can also install this kind of extension from Atom itself, but since we are in the command line, you might as well do it here, and this is done now. I said this was the last tool. Actually there is another one that we need to install on Windows because Windows unfortunately doesn't come with a version of Git pre-installed with the operating system. And Git is a version control system that is heavily used by NPM so when we will install some NPM packages, sometimes it requires Git. So to anticipate on that we can go to the browser. First let's close PowerShell, open the browser and go to "git-scm.com/download/win". And this will automatically download the installer. Installation package is under "Downloads" here, and you can just open this package, close the browser for now, accept the security warning, accept all the defaults, and then let it copy all the files. Now again if you are not familiar with Git, it is a version control system similar to Subversion or CVS, but it is used heavily in the NPM ecosystem. And then we click "Finish" and it's proposing to open the release notes. OK. we can close that and that's it. At this stage, we have all the tools required to start the development of our smart contracts on Windows. One note for the future: in the rest of this course, we are going to type a lot of commands in the command line prompt, and on Windows you can either use the legacy command line interface or the Windows PowerShell. Again we strongly advise you to use the Windows PowerShell throughout this course, otherwise some commands might fail. And even though most of the videos in this course were shot on a Mac with a UNIX terminal, the very same commands were all tested to work in a Windows PowerShell, unless explicitly stated otherwise. So again we tested everything. If there are some differences, we will mention them explicitly. In the next lecture, we'll show you how to set up and start a private Ethereum node.