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Quick Start

Prerequisites​

You will need:

The Colony Network contracts are written in Solidity and are built, tested and deployed using the Truffle Suite. With the above dependencies in place you can just follow the instructions below and the Colony Network build scripts will sort out everything else for you.

tip

If you're a Dapp developer looking to integrate with colony, we recommend using The Colony SDK as an entry point as it is the fastest way to start building with Colony. There you'll find analogous instructions better suited to building applications on top of the colonyNetwork. We also have created some examples that you can try out live in your browser!

Cloning the repository and preparing the dependencies​

Clone the repository including all its git submodules using this command:

git clone https://github.com/JoinColony/colonyNetwork.git --recursive
caution

Heads up! Don't forget to add the --recursive flag to also clone the git submodules. They are important building blocks for some of the contracts.

Change to the colonyNetwork directory and check out the latest version tag (find a list of all released versions and their tags here):

cd colonyNetwork
git checkout eac730e # replace eac730e with glwss in the future as soon as it's available
info

Check out a tagged git release if you want to develop against the ColonyNetwork contracts (like running an RPC node)! Only tagged GitHub releases are known to work under all circumstances and are the ones that ultimately get deployed to the relevant live chains. If you want to work on the ColonyNetwork contracts themselves, this should be omitted.

Then, install the required dependencies using npm:

nvm use # alternatively, make sure you are using node version 14.x
npm ci # make sure you are using node version 14.x

This will take some time. If you run into issues, see the Troubleshooting section below.

Provisioning the Token Contracts​

The ColonyNetwork uses some Token Artifacts that need to be built first. To do that issue the command

When using docker the correct version of the solc compiler is automatically downloaded and it usually runs faster.

npm run provision:token:contracts

Great! Now you're ready to compile the contracts and run the tests.

Where to go from here?​

You're already able to make modifications to the contracts and run those against the tests. Next step is to deploy the Colony Network contracts locally.

Troubleshooting​

Q: There's a Python error, what's going on?​

A: Some ColonyNetwork dependencies require Python in older versions. To get around that, pyenv has been proven very useful. Install pyenv for your environment according to their guide, then issue the following command in the colonyNetwork directory:

pyenv install 2.7.18
pyenv local 2.7.18

This will create a file called .python-version and instruct pyenv to use Python in version 2.7.18. After that, try running npm ci again.

Q: I'm trying to deploy but it can't connect to the local ganache instance​

A: Use NodeJS version 14.x nvm can help!