We recommend a minimum hardware configuration of 16 GB RAM, 2 processors and 100 GB free hard disk space.

Setting up NIX and Haskell

The following steps should get your environment set up without hassles. The instructions assume that you have a Linux based OS. If you are on Windows, you can set up WSL2 on your machine and then follow the steps below.

  1. Set up nix Create a directory /etc/nix if it does not exist Install nix: https://nixos.org/download.html

  2. Install Haskell toolchain from Haskell.org

  3. Install GHC, cabal-install and haskell-language-server using ghcup installer.

Setting up the Plutus platform

The Plutus Platform is an application development platform for developing distributed applications using the Cardano blockchain. This is similar to SDKs that you use in other programming languages. It includes the core libraries that are needed for writing Plutus smart contracts, the Haskell to Plutus compiler and the Plutus playground - a web based interactive playground. It also includes the toolchain for Marlowe, a domain-specific language for building smart contracts, which is not covered in this guidebook.

Clone the plutus-apps repository . Follow the steps for building the project. Remember to add the IOHK binary cache to your Nix configuration as mentioned, as that speeds up the build.

Plutus Starter project

This project will give you a feel of how a smart contract executable works. Running the example in this project first before you read the code or watch the lectures, will help visualise how things work and can work as you progress. This is especially the case if you are a developer. To build and execute the starter project, it is sufficient that you have the environment setup done correctly. You do not need to write any code at this point. You can find IOHK’s plutus starter repository here.