Hello World Pt. 2 - Local Development

The Flow Command Line Interface (CLI) is a set of tools that developers can use to interact with the Flow blockchain by managing accounts, sending transactions, deploying smart contracts, running the emulator, and more. This quickstart will get you familiar with its main concepts and functionality.

Installation

The first thing you'll need to do is install the Flow CLI. If you have homebrew installed you can run:

brew install flow-cli

For other ways of installing, please refer to the installation guide.

Configuration

Lets first create a project directory and navigate to it:

mkdir cli-quickstart
cd cli-quickstart

Next, we'll initialize a new Flow project with the CLI:

flow init --config-only

This will create a flow.json file in your project directory. This file is used to configure your project and describe the setup of your contracts, networks, and accounts.

It will also have a default emulator-account created for you. We'll use this account to interact with the emulator later on.

info

For additional details on how flow.json is configured, read here.

Grabbing the HelloWorld Contract

For this demo, we are going to be interacting with a simple HelloWorld contract that is already deployed on Flow's testnet network on account 0xa1296b1e2e90ca5b. In order to grab this project dependency, we'll use Flow's Dependency Manager to install it into our project using a source string that defines the network, address, and contract name of the contract we want to import.

flow dependencies add testnet://0xa1296b1e2e90ca5b.HelloWorld

This will add the HelloWorld contract and any of its dependencies to an imports directory in your project (we recommend adding this directory to your .gitignore file). It will also add any dependencies to your flow.json file.

During the install you'll be prompted to specify which account to deploy the contracts to. For this tutorial, you can select the default emulator-account.

Opening the contract file in your editor you should see the following:

access(all) contract HelloWorld {

  access(all)
  var greeting: String

  access(all)
  fun changeGreeting(newGreeting: String) {
    self.greeting = newGreeting
  }

  init() {
    self.greeting = "Hello, World!"
  }
}

This contract has a greeting variable that can be read and changed. It also has a changeGreeting function that allows you to change the greeting.

Deploying the Contract to Emulator

Emulator is a local version of the Flow blockchain that you can use to test your contracts and scripts. It's a great way to develop and test your contracts without having to interact with the testnet or mainnet.

Before we deploy, let's open a new terminal window and run the emulator:

flow emulator start

To deploy the HelloWorld contract to the emulator, you can run the following command:

flow project deploy

The contract will now have been deployed to the account you selected earlier. You can now interact with it using a script.

Running Scripts

Scripts are used to read data from the Flow blockchain. There is no state modification. In our case, we are going to read a greeting from the HelloWorld contract.

Let's create a script file. We can generate a boilerplate script file with the following command:

flow generate script ReadGreeting

This will create a file called ReadGreeting.cdc in the cadence/scripts directory. Let's update the script to read the greeting from the HelloWorld contract:

import "HelloWorld"

access(all)
fun main(): String {
  return HelloWorld.greeting
}

The import syntax will automatically resolve the address of the contract on the network you are running the script on. This is determined by your flow.json configuration.

Note: if you'll like to learn more about writing scripts, please read here.

To run the script, we'll run this from the CLI:

flow scripts execute cadence/scripts/ReadGreeting.cdc

You should see the result of the greeting. Result: "Hello, world!"

Creating an Account and Running a Transaction

To change state on the Flow Blockchain, you need to run a transaction. Let's create a simple transaction file. We can use to modify the greeting on the HelloWorld contract.

First, create a file called cadence/transactions/ChangeGreeting.cdc with the following command:

flow generate transaction ChangeGreeting

Update the boilerplate transaction to look like this:

import "HelloWorld"

transaction(greeting: String) {

  prepare(acct: AuthAccount) {
    log(acct.address)
  }

  execute {
    HelloWorld.changeGreeting(newGreeting: greeting)
  }
}

This will log the account signing the transaction, call the changeGreeting method of the HelloWorld contract, and pass in the new greeting. (If you want to learn more about writing transactions, please read here).

In order to run a transaction, the signing account needs to pay for it. We could run a transaction on emulator using the default emulator-account account. Let's learn one more command for creating accounts.

The easiest way to create an account using CLI is by running (remember, your emulator should still be running at this point in another terminal):

flow accounts create

Once that runs, select Emulator as the network and give your account the name emulator-tester. You'll now see this account in your flow.json.

To run a transaction with this new account, you can run the following:

flow transactions send cadence/transactions/ChangeGreeting.cdc "Hello, me" --signer emulator-tester --network emulator

You've just modified the state of the Flow Blockchain!

If you want to continue on generating your own contracts, you can also use the the generate subcommand to create a new contract file. See more on the generate documentation.

After that, it's easy to add your contract to your project configuration using the Flow CLI config commands.

Installation​

Configuration​

Grabbing the HelloWorld Contract​

Deploying the Contract to Emulator​

Running Scripts​

Creating an Account and Running a Transaction​

More​