Having done a brief introduction to Cairo and Starknet, we are going to be moving unto getting familiar with Cairo 1.0. But before we delve into writing Cairo, we'll need to set up a development Environment for writing, compiling and deploying our Starknet contracts!
A development environment is a workspace with a set of processes and programming tools to help developers efficiently build, test, and debug an application or program.
Similar to how we have a plethora of options for developing on Ethereum with Solidity (Truffle, Foundry, Hardhat, etc), we also have a good amount of options for Cairo development on StarkNet. Amongst them are Protostar/Scarb (developed by the Software Mansion Team), Cairo-lang (official development framework), Nile (from the OpenZeppelin Team), and Hardhat (which is a plugin developed by ShardLabs).
At the time of this writing, Scarb and Cairo-lang are the most efficient frameworks for Cairo 1.0 development, so we are going to use the Cairo-lang framework for the purpose of this guide.
In order to install and use the Cairo-lang framework effectively, you'd need to have Rust and Python3.9.0 installed. You could check out the installation guides below:
Having installed these, we'll move forward to setting up a virtual python environment.
Python's virtual environment enables you install libraries and scripts, that are isolated from those installed in other virtual environments and on your system environment. We recommend working inside a virtual environment whilst working with Cairo-lang.
To create and enter a virtual environment, use the command below:
python3.9 -m venv ~/cairo_venv
source ~/cairo_venv/bin/activate
Alternatively you could use pyenv.
Having setup our virtual environment, we are going to install a few packages before finally installing Cairo-lang:
For Ubuntu users:
sudo apt install -y libgmp3-dev
pip install ecdsa fastecdsa sympy
For Mac users:
brew install gmp
pip install ecdsa fastecdsa sympy
Then we can now finally install Cairo-lang using pip:
pip install cairo-lang
PS: If you had a previous version of Cairo-lang installed, ensure to uninstall it before running the installation command. To uninstall, simply run:
pip uninstall cairo-lang
To confirm installation run the command below:
starknet --version
If installation was successful, you should see the Cairo-lang version displayed.
To complete our environment setup, we'd need some certain executables like cairo-compile, starknet-compile etc. To get this we'd do a little engineering:
Firstly change directory to Home, and clone the main cairo repository:
cd ~/
git clone https://github.com/starkware-libs/cairo/ .cairo
Then checkout to the working branch and generate the release binaries:
cd .cairo/
git checkout tags/v1.0.0-alpha.6
cargo build --all --release
Finally, we are going to add this generated binaries as executables to our path (.bashrc or .zshrc):
export PATH="$HOME/.cairo/target/release:$PATH"
To confirm if this process was successful, open a new terminal and run the command below:
cairo-compile --version
You should have your compiler version outputted on the terminal if everything works as expected!
Having setup our development environment, we can now delve into Cairo!