The Haskell libraries in the Plutus Platform can be built in a number of ways. The prerequisites depend on how you want to build the libraries. The other artifacts (docs etc.) are most easily built with Nix, so we recommend installing it regardless.

• Nix (recommended).

  • Install Nix following the instructions on the Nix website.

    Important

    Even if you already have Nix installed, make sure to set up the IOHK binary cache.

  • See the section on Nix for further advice on using Nix.

• cabal (if building Haskell packages with cabal).

• stack (if building Haskell packages with stack).

There is an example project in the example folder, see its README for more details.

How to build Haskell packages and other artifacts with Nix

How to build Haskell packages with cabal

How to build the Haskell packages with stack

1. Install Docker following the instructions on the Docker website.

2. Run nix build -f default.nix docker.plutusPlaygroundImage, to build

3. Run docker load < docker-image-plutus-playgrounds.tar.gz - this will print out the image name at the end, e.g. Loaded image: plutus-playgrounds:yn7h7m5qdjnnj9rxv8cgkvvwjkkcdnvp

4. Run docker run --mount ‘type=bind,source=/tmp,target=/tmp’ -p 8080:8080 plutus-playgrounds:yn7h7m5qdjnnj9rxv8cgkvvwjkkcdnvp using the image name from the previous step.

5. Open http://localhost:8080/ in a web browser.

Specifications and design

Academic papers

The plutus-tutorial project contains a basic tutorial for using the Plutus Platform to write smart contracts.

To build a full HTML version of the tutorial that you can view locally, build the docs.plutus-tutorial using Nix.

The changelog is stored in CHANGELOG.

We’re active on the Cardano forum. Tag your post with the plutus tag so we’ll see it.

Use the Github issue tracker for bugs and feature requests, but keep other discussions to the forum.

See CONTRIBUTING, which describes our processes in more detail; and ARCHITECTURE, which describes the structure of the repository.

Adding the IOHK binary cache to your Nix configuration will speed up builds a lot, since many things will have been built already by our CI.

If you find you are building packages that are not defined in this repository, or if the build seems to take a very long time then you may not have this set up properly.

To set up the cache:

1. On non-NixOS, edit /etc/nix/nix.conf and add the following lines:

   substituters        = https://hydra.iohk.io https://cache.nixos.org/
   trusted-public-keys = hydra.iohk.io:f/Ea+s+dFdN+3Y/G+FDgSq+a5NEWhJGzdjvKNGv0/EQ= cache.nixos.org-1:6NCHdD59X431o0gWypbMrAURkbJ16ZPMQFGspcDShjY=

2. On NixOS, set the following NixOS options:

   nix = {
     binaryCaches          = [ "https://hydra.iohk.io" ];
     binaryCachePublicKeys = [ "hydra.iohk.io:f/Ea+s+dFdN+3Y/G+FDgSq+a5NEWhJGzdjvKNGv0/EQ=" ];
   };

Nix on macOS can be a bit tricky. In particular, sandboxing is disabled by default, which can lead to strange failures.

These days it should be safe to turn on sandboxing on macOS with a few exceptions. Consider setting the following Nix settings, in the same way as in previous section:

While developing the libraries, you probably will not want to use Nix to build all the libraries. If you want to use cabal v2-build to build the local projects only, then: . Run nix-shell. . Run cabal v2-build as normal.

default.nix defines a package set with attributes for all the artifacts you can build from this repository. These can be built using nix build. For example:

• Local packages: defined inside localPackages

  • e.g. localPackages.language-plutus-core

• Documents: defined inside docs

  • e.g. docs.plutus-core-spec

• Development scripts: defined inside dev

  • e.g. dev.scripts.fixStylishHaskell

There are other attributes defined in default.nix.