Installation

Let's start with the installation of the Linera development tools.

Overview

The Linera toolchain consists of several crates:

• linera-sdk is the main library used to program Linera applications in Rust.

• linera-service defines a number of binaries, notably linera the main client tool used to operate developer wallets and start local testing networks.

• linera-storage-service provides a simple database used to run local validator nodes for testing and development purposes.

Requirements

The operating systems currently supported by the Linera toolchain can be summarized as follows:

The main prerequisites to install the Linera toolchain are Rust, Wasm, and Protoc. They can be installed as follows on Linux:

• Rust and Wasm

  • curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
  • rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown

• Protoc

  • curl -LO https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/releases/download/v21.11/protoc-21.11-linux-x86_64.zip
  • unzip protoc-21.11-linux-x86_64.zip -d $HOME/.local
  • If ~/.local is not in your path, add it: export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

• On certain Linux distributions, you may have to install development packages such as g++, libclang-dev and libssl-dev.

For MacOS support and for additional requirements needed to test the Linera protocol itself, see the installation section on GitHub.

This manual was tested with the following Rust toolchain:

{{#include ../../../rust-toolchain.toml}}

Installing from crates.io

You may install the Linera binaries with

cargo install --locked linera-storage-service@{{#include ../../RELEASE_VERSION}}
cargo install --locked linera-service@{{#include ../../RELEASE_VERSION}}

and use linera-sdk as a library for Linera Wasm applications:

cargo add linera-sdk@{{#include ../../RELEASE_VERSION}}

The version number {{#include ../../RELEASE_VERSION}} corresponds to the current Testnet of Linera. The minor version may change frequently but should not induce breaking changes.

Installing from GitHub

Download the source from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/linera-io/linera-protocol.git
cd linera-protocol
git checkout -t origin/{{#include ../../RELEASE_BRANCH}}  # Current release branch

To install the Linera toolchain locally from source, you may run:

cargo install --locked --path linera-storage-service
cargo install --locked --path linera-service

Alternatively, for developing and debugging, you may instead use the binaries compiled in debug mode, e.g. using export PATH="$PWD/target/debug:$PATH".

This manual was tested against the following commit of the repository:

{{#include ../../RELEASE_HASH}}

Getting help

If installation fails, reach out to the team (e.g. on Discord) to help troubleshoot your issue or create an issue on GitHub.