Deploy a Solidity Smart Contract Using Truffle and Moonbeam
By: Derek Yoo
Tags: Solidity, Ethereum, Solidity Tutorial, Polkadot, Truffle Suite

Easily deploy a Solidity smart contract to Moonbeam from Truffle

This guide walks through the process of deploying a Solidity-based smart contract to a Moonbeam node using Truffle. Truffle is one of the most commonly used development tools for smart contracts on Ethereum. Given Moonbeam’s Ethereum compatibility features, Truffle can be used directly with a Moonbeam node.

Note: This tutorial was created using the pre-alpha release of Moonbeam. The Moonbeam platform, and the Frontier components it relies on for Substrate-based Ethereum compatibility, are still under very active development. We have created this tutorial so you can test out Moonbeam’s Ethereum compatibility features. Even though we are still in development, we believe it’s important that interested community members and developers have the opportunity to start to try things with Moonbeam and provide feedback.

This guide is based on an Ubuntu 18.04 installation and assumes that you have a running local Moonbeam node running in --dev mode. You can find instructions for running a local Moonbeam node here.

Checking Prerequisites and Setting Up Truffle

If you followed the previous guides, you should have a local Moonbeam node producing blocks that looks like this:

We’ve also created a video of this tutorial, which you can view below. It will cover the same steps we are about to outline.

In addition, for this tutorial, we need to install Node.js (we’ll go for v14.x) and the npm package manager. You can do this by running in your terminal:

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_14.x | sudo -E bash - sudo apt install -y nodejs

We can verify that everything installed correctly by querying the version for each package:

node -v

npm -v

As of the writing of this guide, versions used were 14.6.0 and 6.14.6, respectively.

Next, navigate to the folder where you built Moonbeam and go into the tools/truffle directory. In our case, this is /home/purestake/moonbeam/tools/truffle , but replace this with the correct path for your environment. This directory has a Truffle configuration that is designed to work with a locally running Moonbeam --dev node.

Let’s take a look at the truffle-config.js file:

const PrivateKeyProvider = require (‘./private-provider’)

var privateKey = “99B3C12287537E38C90A9219D4CB074A89A16E9CDB20BF85728EBD97C343E342”; module.exports = {

networks: {

development: {

provider: () => new PrivateKeyProvider(privateKey, “http://localhost:9933/", 43),

network_id: 43

},

live: {

provider: () => new PrivateKeyProvider(privateKey, “http://35.203.125.209:9933/", 43),

network_id: 43

},

ganache: {

provider: () => new PrivateKeyProvider(privateKey, “http://localhost:8545/", 43),

network_id: 43

}

}

}

Note: We are using a PrivateKeyProvider as our Web3 provider (instantiation included in private-provider.js ). This provider is being set up in a very specific way to work around some issues we are currently working on related to chainid , nonce handling , and the skipCache: true setting when using the default Truffle-provided Web3 provider with Moonbeam nodes. We also are using the same private key that we have been using in other guides, which comes pre-funded with tokens via the genesis config of a Moonbeam node running in --dev mode. The public key for this account is: 0x6Be02d1d3665660d22FF9624b7BE0551ee1Ac91b.

The contract we will be deploying with Truffle is a simple ERC-20 contract. You can find this contract under moonbeam/tools/truffle/contracts/MyToken.sol . The content of this file is:

pragma solidity ^0.5.0;

import “ import “ @openzeppelin/contracts /token/ERC20/ERC20.sol”;import “ @openzeppelin/contracts /token/ERC20/ERC20Detailed.sol”; // This ERC-20 contract mints the specified amount of tokens to the contract creator.

contract MyToken is ERC20, ERC20Detailed {

constructor(uint256 initialSupply)

public

ERC20Detailed(“MyToken”, “MYTOK”, 18)

{

_mint(msg.sender, initialSupply);

}

}

This is a simple ERC-20 contract based on the OpenZepplin ERC-20 contract that creates MyToken and assigns the created initial token supply to the contract creator.

If we take a look at the Truffle migration script under migrations/2_deploy_contracts.js , it contains the following:

var MyToken = artifacts.require(“MyToken”); module.exports = function (deployer) {

// deployment steps

deployer.deploy(MyToken, “8000000000000000000000000”, { gas: 4294967295 });

};

“8000000000000000000000000” is the number of tokens to initially mint with the contract, that is, 8 million with 18 decimal places.

Note: We are specifying the gas to send with the contract deployment transaction. This is needed as we are still working on some of the gas estimation functionality in Moonbeam.

The last setup step is to install all of the dependencies. Do this by running the following command in the moonbeam/tools/truffle folder:

npm install

As the installation proceeds, you may see errors related to the compilation of keccak, which can be safely ignored for purposes of this walkthrough.

At the end of the process you should see a note about the number of packages which have been added:

Deploying a Contract to Moonbeam Using Truffle

Before we can deploy our contracts, let’s compile them. You can do this with the following command:

node_modules/.bin/truffle compile

If successful, you should see output like the following:

Now we are ready to deploy the compiled contracts. You can do this with the following command:

node_modules/.bin/truffle migrate --network development

If successful, you will see deployment actions including the address of the deployed contract:

Once you have followed the MetaMask guide and Remix guide, you will be able to take the deployed contract address that is returned and load it into MetaMask or Remix.

We Want to Hear From You

This is obviously a simple example, but it provides context for how you can start working with Moonbeam and how you can try out its Ethereum compatibility features. We are interested in hearing about your experience following the steps in this guide or your experience trying other Ethereum-based tools with Moonbeam. Feel free to join us in the Moonbeam Riot room here. We would love to hear your feedback on Moonbeam and answer any questions that you have.