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 = "1.77.2"
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-service@0.12.0

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

cargo add linera-sdk@0.12.0

The version number 0.12.0 corresponds to the current Devnet of Linera and may change frequently.

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/devnet_2024_09_04  # Current release branch

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

cargo install --locked --path linera-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:

2ada2e77e6a2f3dfa3bd32f4dc609bdadd0fbf3a

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.