Solana DApp Development (Part 1)- Development Environment

Kerala Blockchain Academy
4 min readMar 11, 2024

By Lekshmi P G, R & D Engineer, Kerala Blockchain Academy

Prefer watching videos over reading text? Check out our YouTube video on Solana Wallets and Smart Contracts here.

In the previous article, we deployed a sample smart contract on Solana IDE — Solana Playground. If you haven’t read it, find it here. With this article, we’re moving to the actual DApp Development in Solana. We’re into setting up the Development Environment for it. So, let’s get started.

Installing Rust

We can get the command to install Rust from the official Website.

Select the Install option from here; on that page, you can find the command to install Rust.

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Paste this command on Terminal and Execute. You will now get three options.

Go with the first option, Proceed with installation (default), and wait for it to finish.

Rust installed successfully. Restart your system and check for the Rust version using the command,

rustc --version

So, Yes, Rust is Installed.

Installing Solana CLI

Solana CLI enables us to manage accounts, connect to the devnet, testnet or mainnet of Solana, and deploy network contracts. Let’s install it. You can go to this site to learn more. Here, you can find the command to install Solana CLI.

sh -c "$(curl -sSfL https://release.solana.com/stable/install)"

Paste this command on the terminal and enter.

There is nothing wrong. It will take some time; patiently wait. When it is complete, reload the terminal and check for successful installation using the command,

solana --version

So, the next task is to create an account in the Solana ecosystem. For that, use this command,

solana-keygen new

Enter a Passphrase and enter. Now, you will get a key pair and seed phrase. Using this seed phrase and BIP39 passphrase, you can get another keypair. Now, let’s configure it to connect to Devnet or Testnet. Here, we are configuring with Devnet.

solana config set --url devnet

We can see the connection profile using the command,

solana config get

Now check the balance using the command,

solana balance

Our balance is 0 SOL. Dont worry, Solana will airdrop SOL to our account using the command,

solana airdrop 1

Now, go and check your balance.

Happy! With that, we have set up our development environment. In the coming article, we will look at how to deploy a Contract and deploy it via the Solana CLI. Stay tuned.

References

  1. https://solanacookbook.com/#contributing
  2. https://solana.com/developers
  3. https://www.alchemy.com/overviews/learn-solana-development

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