Installation

Let's start with the installation of the Linera development tools.

Overview

The Linera toolchain consists of two crates:

• linera-sdk is the main library to program Linera applications in Rust.

• linera-service defines a number of binaries, including:

  • linera -- the main client tool, used to operate development wallets,
  • linera-proxy -- the proxy service, acting as a public entrypoint for each validator,
  • linera-server -- the service run by each worker of a validator, hidden behind the proxy.

Requirements

The operating systems currently supported by the Linera toolchain can be summarized as follows:

The main prerequisites to install the Linera toolchain are Rust, Wasm, and Protoc. They can be installed as follows on Linux:

• Rust and Wasm

  • curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
  • rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown

• Protoc

  • curl -LO https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/releases/download/v21.11/protoc-21.11-linux-x86_64.zip
  • unzip protoc-21.11-linux-x86_64.zip -d $HOME/.local
  • If ~/.local is not in your path, add it: export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin"

• On certain Linux distributions, you may have to install development packages such as g++, libclang-dev and libssl-dev.

For MacOS support and for additional requirements needed to test the Linera protocol itself, see the installation section on GitHub.

This manual was tested with the following Rust toolchain:

[toolchain]
channel = "1.81.0"
components = [ "clippy", "rustfmt", "rust-src" ]
targets = [ "wasm32-unknown-unknown" ]
profile = "minimal"

Installing from crates.io

You may install the Linera binaries with

cargo install --locked linera-storage-service@0.13.1
cargo install --locked linera-service@0.13.1 --features storage-service

and use linera-sdk as a library for Linera Wasm applications:

cargo add linera-sdk@0.13.1

The version number 0.13.1 corresponds to the current Testnet of Linera. The minor version may change frequently but should not induce breaking changes.

Installing from GitHub

Download the source from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/linera-io/linera-protocol.git
cd linera-protocol
git checkout -t origin/testnet_archimedes  # Current release branch

To install the Linera toolchain locally from source, you may run:

cargo install --locked --path linera-storage-service
cargo install --locked --path linera-service --features storage-service

Alternatively, for developing and debugging, you may instead use the binaries compiled in debug mode, e.g. using export PATH="$PWD/target/debug:$PATH".

This manual was tested against the following commit of the repository:

f84b66720b92b2eab86622e26b56c3aa2adbc0c0

Bash helper (optional)

Consider adding the output of linera net helper to your ~/.bash_profile to help with automation.

Getting help

If installation fails, reach out to the team (e.g. on Discord) to help troubleshoot your issue or create an issue on GitHub.