The Haskell libraries in the Plutus Platform can be built in a number of ways. The prerequisites depend on how you want to build the libraries. The other artifacts (docs etc.) are most easily built with Nix, so we recommend installing it regardless.

The plutus-starter repository contains a starter setup.

The doc folder contains the documentation site.

To build a full HTML version of the site that you can view locally, build the docs.site attribute using Nix.

The online version of the tutorial can be found here

User issues can be filed in the GitHub Issue tracker.

However, note that this is pre-release software, so we will not usually be providing support.

We’re active on the Cardano forum. Tag your post with the plutus tag so we’ll see it.

Use the Github issue tracker for bugs and feature requests, but keep other discussions to the forum.

See CONTRIBUTING, which describes our processes in more detail including development environments; and ARCHITECTURE, which describes the structure of the repository.

Adding the IOHK binary cache to your Nix configuration will speed up builds a lot, since many things will have been built already by our CI.

If you find you are building packages that are not defined in this repository, or if the build seems to take a very long time then you may not have this set up properly.

To set up the cache:

1. On non-NixOS, edit /etc/nix/nix.conf and add the following lines:

   substituters        = https://hydra.iohk.io https://iohk.cachix.org https://cache.nixos.org/
   trusted-public-keys = hydra.iohk.io:f/Ea+s+dFdN+3Y/G+FDgSq+a5NEWhJGzdjvKNGv0/EQ= iohk.cachix.org-1:DpRUyj7h7V830dp/i6Nti+NEO2/nhblbov/8MW7Rqoo= cache.nixos.org-1:6NCHdD59X431o0gWypbMrAURkbJ16ZPMQFGspcDShjY=

2. On NixOS, set the following NixOS options:

   nix = {
     binaryCaches          = [ "https://hydra.iohk.io" "https://iohk.cachix.org" ];
     binaryCachePublicKeys = [ "hydra.iohk.io:f/Ea+s+dFdN+3Y/G+FDgSq+a5NEWhJGzdjvKNGv0/EQ=" "iohk.cachix.org-1:DpRUyj7h7V830dp/i6Nti+NEO2/nhblbov/8MW7Rqoo=" ];
   };

Nix on macOS can be a bit tricky. In particular, sandboxing is disabled by default, which can lead to strange failures.

These days it should be safe to turn on sandboxing on macOS with a few exceptions. Consider setting the following Nix settings, in the same way as in previous section:

default.nix defines a package set with attributes for all the artifacts you can build from this repository. These can be built using nix build. For example:

• Project packages: defined inside plutus.haskell.packages

  • e.g. plutus.haskell.packages.plutus-core.components.library

• Documents: defined inside docs

  • e.g. docs.plutus-core-spec

• Development scripts: defined inside dev

  • e.g. dev.scripts.fixStylishHaskell

There are other attributes defined in default.nix.