#Installing from Source

A step-by-step guide on how to prepare a fully-functional environment from source.

#Introduction

This guide will take you through the basic steps of setting up a development environment from scratch on a fresh Linux (*.deb based) box. We officially recommend and support Ubuntu operating system.

#Step 1: User setup

We will create a new user mainsail and add this user to the sudoers group (allowing root execution if needed). You can skip this step as a developer and continue to next steps below.

If you are running on a fresh cloud box, like for example DigitalOcean , then create a user with the following commands below.

1# Create the user (example: 'mainsail')
2sudo adduser mainsail
3sudo usermod -aG sudo mainsail
4 
5# Login as the newly user
6sudo su - mainsail

#Step 2: Update the System

Before we start, we need to make sure that the system is up to date. This can be done by running the following commands.

1sudo apt-get update
2sudo apt-get upgrade -y

#Step 3: Install Git Source Control System

As the most popular version control software in existence, Git is a staple of many developer workflows, and ARK is no exception. Downloading Git will allow you to clone the latest version of Mainsail.

1sudo apt-get install -y git curl apt-transport-https build-essential python-is-python3

#Step 4: Install NVM & Node.js Runtime

Mainsail is written exclusively in Node.js , the server-side framework for JavaScript, Typescript, installing Node.js is a necessity for Mainsail development. The code below installs NVM - Node Version Manager , which allows you to install and manage multiple versions of Node.js on the same system.

1curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.7/install.sh | bash
2 
3export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
4[ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh"  # This loads nvm
5[ -s "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion"  # This loads nvm bash_completion

#Step 5: Install Node.js

Now that NVM is installed, you can install the latest version of Node.js. The following command will install the latest LTS version of Node.js.

1nvm install --lts

#Step 6: Install PNPM Package Manager

Pnpm is a package manager for JavaScript, which is fast, disk space efficient, and optimized for monorepos. It uses hard links and symlinks to save one version of a module only ever once on a disk. This is especially useful for a monorepo like Mainsail.

1npm install -g npm@latest
2npm i -g pnpm
3 
4pnpm setup

#Step 7: Install Dependencies

Dependencies are needed for Mainsail to be compiled, run and controlled while living inside you linux based environment. To command below installs some of those needed dependencies that are used by Mainsail or related scripts.

1sudo apt-get install build-essential python-is-python3 libjemalloc-dev -yq

#Step 8: Clone The Mainsail Repository

Let’s clone our Mainsail repository and run the initial pnpm run setup command.

pnpm run setup command leverages Lerna to clean, bootstrap and build the Mainsail packages (including transpiling typescript). For mode information look into project package.json file in the root folder.

1git clone https://github.com/ArkEcosystem/mainsail
2cd mainsail
3git checkout main
4git pull
5pnpm run setup  #run Lerna to clean, bootstrap and build packages

#Step 9: Run network

#Step 9.1: Run local testnet

Now that we have the Mainsail repository cloned and setup, we can run a local testnet network. Local testnet network is a local blockchain network that is used for development and testing purposes. Local network will not be able to connect to the mainnet or devnet, but it will allow you to test your plugins and dApps in a controlled environment.

1cd packages/core
2pnpm run full:testnet

#Step 9.2: Run official testnet

If you want to run the official testnet, you can use the following command.

1cd packages/core
2 
3pnpm run mainsail config:publish:custom --app=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ArkEcosystem/mainsail-network-config/main/testnet/mainsail/app.json --crypto=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ArkEcosystem/mainsail-network-config/main/testnet/mainsail/crypto.json --peers=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ArkEcosystem/mainsail-network-config/main/testnet/mainsail/peers.json --reset
4pnpm run mainsail core:run