Boostraping a plutus Smart contract project

Question

I'm trying to "play" with Plutus and write some smart contract for the sake of practicing and getting familiar with it.

My problem is I don't know how to bootstrap a smart contract project.

Starting from the Plutus page on the Cardano Developer Portal, I've watched several videos and read through the user documentation but did not find my way to create a Cardano smart contract project.

What could help me would be:

1. A template for a minimal Haskell project to write such contracts
2. Explanations on how to automatically test my smart contract
3. Step by step tutorial on how to go from my Haskell code to having the contract deployed on a dev or test net

Answer 1

I don't have a concrete answer to your question but I can tell you this is definitely something that's in the making. Perhaps an adequate starting point would be the part of Hydra project that deals with just the smart contracts:

• This is the source tree for the Plutus contracts: https://github.com/input-output-hk/hydra-poc/tree/master/hydra-plutus
• The contracts are unit tested here: https://github.com/input-output-hk/hydra-poc/blob/master/hydra-node/test/Hydra/Chain/Direct/ContractSpec.hs but this requires a bit of scaffolding.

I know this is probably not very helpful...

Answer 2

The Plutus Pioneer Program repository is very helpful to get started:

• https://github.com/input-output-hk/plutus-pioneer-program/tree/main/code

There are also Youtube videos explaining the code examples here:

• https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNEK_Ejlx3x0mhPmOjPSHZPtTFpfJo3Nd

It's all PlutusV1 as far as I know.

Answer 3

After learning the basic I just used: https://github.com/input-output-hk/plutus-starter to get all the environment I needed for building my first validators in plutus.

beware it is not updated to Vasil code

Answer 4

1. See this post
2. You can write tests with QuickCheck
3. There are many ways to achieve this. If you aren't concerned about the architecture and are just in it for learning, an easy way is by using lucid + blockfrost.