- Welcome
- Video Walkthrough
- Gitpod
- Stellar Quest CLI
- Rust Environment
- Stellar CLI
- Testnet
- Good Luck
- Join us on Discord
Welcome to the Pioneer Quest for our upcoming Soroban Quest! We are beyond excited you've joined us. These quests are going to be fun, exciting, and interesting to be sure! There's a lot to go through so you are up to speed, so let's jump in!
The rest of this README is quite heavily skewed toward written information. That's not everybody's primary way of learning, so we've created a video walkthrough you can check out, as well. It doesn't contain everything in this README, but it's a start. If that kind of content sounds like it's more up your alley, you can watch the video right here!
You are reading this from inside a Gitpod development environment. You heard right! A freshly baked, automated environment built just for you! A couple things you should know about Gitpod:
Gitpod is built around a fully-functional copy of the VS Code IDE. Entirely in your browser! All the things you can do in the local version of VS Code, you can do here. Just about any extension you have in your local copy you can install here. You get the idea.
In your Gitpod workspace, you'll notice a panel at the bottom that is open to a
few terminal shells. There are a few methods to show/hide this panel, but my
favorite is the Ctrl + ` keyboard shortcut. There is a lot of information
in the VS Code docs about how to use these integrated terminals.
This panel will actually be pretty important to your questing success, so let's take a second to examine this a bit more in-depth.
On the right-hand side of this panel, you'll notice there are 4 (four) shells open. Each of them is designed for a specific purpose:
Albedo Signer- A simple webapp that facilitates claiming rewards for completed quests. (You won't be required to actually do anything in this shell.)Testnet: docker- An instance of the Testnet node that is running inside your Gitpod workspace. (You won't be required to actually do anything in this shell either.)CLI - Testnet- This shell is designed for interacting with the Testnet network. It has some environment variables customized for this purpose, and will make it easier and quicker for you to work with the network. When we say something like "you need to deploy a contract to the Testnet," you'll want to do that from this shell.
Above this list of terminals, you could use the + icon to open another terminal, if you closed one of yours.
There are also a couple open ports that can be useful during your quests. You can see these ports by clicking on Ports in the top part of the terminal panel (see above screenshot). You could also click on Ports: 8000, 3000 in the lower-right-hand corner of the Gitpod workspace (see below screenshot).
- Port 3000 - You can ignore the Albedo Signer port. That's open so we
can use it along with the
sqCLI to get your earned rewards to you. - Port 8000 - On port 8000 of your Gitpod workspace lives various tools to interact with the Testnet network. There is a running instance of JSON-RPC (which you will need to use) and a Horizon API server (which can be very useful).
Both of these ports are publicly available on the web, at the listed addresses. You could even use this RPC endpoint to interact with the Testnet network from your local computer!
That's right, Gitpod is running on a Docker-ized container so that we can be
certain your setup for these Soroban Quests is exactly the same as our
setup! We have a few tasks configured to run on your Gitpod's startup. They're
briefly explained below, but you can also read through .gitpod.yml and
.gitpod.Dockerfile to get a sense of what is happening during the build
process.
Gitpod has its very own CLI that you can use to manage a running Gitpod workspace. It's got loads of useful features, and tons of ways you can use it. Preat neat, huh!? You can learn all about it here!
Would you belive that we've made, specifically for our Soroban Quest, a Stellar
Quest CLI?! No joke! It's super awesome, and absolutely essential for you
to understand, if you want to succeed in this live series. It's (awesomely)
called "Squirtle" but you'll become more familiar with invoking it as sq. The
code for it lives in the _squirtle/ directory, but you won't need to bother
with anything in there.
It exists as a command line tool that can connect your Gitpod instance with the SQ backend. You can use it to:
- login to your Stellar Quest account using Discord (or logout),
- get information about the currently logged in user,
- visit the Stellar Quest website,
- fetch new quests when they become available,
- generate a keypair to play a particular quest,
- fund Quest Keypairs on the Testnet,
- check and/or verify the quests you've completed,
- get rewards for completing quests successfully
You can invoke sq from within any of the bash shells in this Gitpod workspace.
The output of sq --help is shown below, for your convenience. You can also
invoke sq <command> --help to get more information on how to use a particular
command.
$ sq help
sq
Commands:
sq login Connect your Stellar Quest account to Gitpod
sq logout Disconnect your Stellar Quest account from Gitpod
sq user Print out information about yourself [aliases: me]
sq open Open the Stellar Quest website
sq pull Pull any new or missing Quests into the /quests directory
sq play [index] Generate a Quest Keypair to play a Quest
sq fund [key] Create and fund an account on the Testnet
sq check [index] Check your Quest answer
sq submit [xdr] Submit a signed award XDR to the Stellar Quest backend
sq rpc Check the status of your local RPC endpoint
[aliases: horizon]
sq [default]
Options:
--version Show version number [boolean]
-h, --help Show help [boolean]Crucially toward the goal of writing smart contracts for Stellar, your workspace contains a fully configured, ready to go Rust development environment. We have all the tooling, compilers, build processes, and anything else you'll need to hit the ground running. This includes:
- A specified version of the Rust programming language
- This pre-configured VS Code editor, with some essential extensions
- The Cargo package manager for Rust crates
- The
wasm32-unknown-unknowntarget for compiling your contracts
You have enough pre-installed to write, debug, test, build, and deploy Stellar
smart contracts from right within this Gitpod workspace. We even have an example
contract ready for you to look through in the quests/0-hello-world/ directory.
Your workspace includes the Stellar CLI, as well. The Stellar CLI is an essential tool to interact with Stellar's JSON-RPC servers and execute smart contracts on the network. You can always find the latest about the Stellar CLI here!
Did you know you have access to a Stellar network node right now!? Yeah, right here in your browser, in this workspace there's a Stellar node connected to the "Testnet" testing network. We've taken care of all the work so you don't have to worry about docker images, starting the service, or anything besides learning to make contracts!
This will come in very handy when you are ready to deploy and share your contracts.
Now that you're (at least somewhat) familiar with the lay of the land, you're ready to get questing! Open up that Gitpod, and get to work! Most importantly, have fun!!
In the Stellar Developers Discord server, you will find a large, active, and helpful community! We have recently announced a $100M Soroban Adoption Fund, which SDF created to support the growth and development of the Soroban ecosystem. We'll be sharing more about additional programs on the Stellar Dev Discord in the not-too-distant future, so make sure to join today to be the among the first to hear those announcements. This is yet another way for you to Tinker and Earn XLM with Stellar smart contracts! Many of the people who are creating the Soroban platform are there, and willing to answer questions, too! Talk about "straight from the horse's mouth"!!