Step 2 : Install Truffle and Ganache

What we achieved in step 1 was to launch a local RSKj node on a Regtest network. Be sure to keep it running because instead of issuing manual JSON-RPC requests, we are now going to use some a more advanced developer tool, the Truffle Suite. Truffle and Ganache provides a development environment, test framework, and asset pipeline for blockchains.

Clone the tutorial project

Before we begin, let's make a copy of the project which we will use for the remainder of this tutorial.

The tutorial project files can be downloaded from github.com/rsksmart/truffle-integration.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/rsksmart/truffle-integration
cd truffle-integration

Install Truffle

Navigate to the truffle directory within the tutorial, install npm-check-updates, update dependencies versions and install them.

cd <tutorial-root>/truffle
npm i npm-check-updates
npm install

Let us verify that we have the correct version of truffle running.

npx truffle version

This should output a version that matches the version number for truffle specified in <tutorial-root>/truffle/package.json.

Note that we use npx truffle instead of truffle to ensure that the version installed within this directory is used, and not a globally installed copy of truffle.

Truffle Network Configuration

Open the truffle-config.js file in the truffle directory. Locate the following part under networks. This part tells Truffle how to connect to our Regtest node.

module.exports = {
  // ...
  networks: {
    //...
    regtest: {
      provider: new PrivateKeyProvider(privateKey, 'http://127.0.0.1:4444'),
      host: '127.0.0.1',
      port: 4444,
      network_id: 33,
    },
    //...
  },
  // ...
};

Note that the value for privateKey has been hard coded into the config file. This is something that you would not do normally. As this is a tutorial, and we are not on the main net, this is OK.

Truffle Console

Truffle console is a basic interactive console connecting to a node. We will be using it to connect to our regtest node running locally.

Type the following command into a terminal.

npx truffle console --network regtest

This will open a REPL in your terminal, in which you can type in commands to interact with the node that you have connected to, using the web3.js API.

truffle(regtest)>

Note that the --network parameter identifies which network we should connect to, and look for the options related to that within the truffle-config.js file. We can verify this by entering the following command:

web3.eth.net.getId()
33

Ensure that the output is 33, which is the network ID of the regtest node.

Enter the command below to exit the REPL.

.exit

Install Ganache

Navigate to the ganache directory within the tutorial, and install its dependencies.

cd <tutorial-root>/ganache
npm install

On Ubuntu, you may see an error in the terminal: Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module" To fix this, install the required GTK modules which also needs to be installed.

sudo apt install libcanberra-gtk-module libcanberra-gtk3-module

Start Ganache.

npm run dev

Ganache is a GUI app.

More on Truffle and Ganache

To learn more about Truffle's commands, visit their official website.