Welcome to the Pioneer Quest for our upcoming Soroban Quest! We are beyond excited you've joined us. These quests are going to be fun, exciting, and interesting to be sure! There's a lot to go through so you are up to speed, so let's jump in!
You are reading this from inside a Gitpod development environment. You heard right! A freshly baked, automated environment built just for you! A couple things you should know about Gitpod:
Gitpod is built around a fully-functional copy of the VS Code IDE. Entirely in your browser! All the things you can do in the local version of VS Code, you can do here. Just about ny extension you have in your local copy, you can install it here. You get the idea.
That's right, Gitpod is running on a Docker-ized container so that we can be
certain your setup for these Soroban Quests is exactly the same as our
setup! We have a few tasks configured to run on your Gitpod's startup. They're
briefly explained below, but you can also read through .gitpod.yml and
.gitpod.Dockerfile to get a sense of what is happening at what point during
the build process.
Gitpod has its very own CLI that you can use to manage a running Gitpod workspace. It's got loads of useful features, and tons of ways you can use it. Preat neat, huh!? You can learn all about it here!
Would you belive that we've made, specifically for our Soroban Quest, a Stellar
Quest CLI?! No joke! It's super awesome, and absolutely essential for you
to understand, if you want to succeed in this live series. It's (awesomely)
called "squirtle" but you'll become more familiar with invoking it as sq. The
code for it lives in the _squirtle/ directory, but you won't need to bother
with anything in there.
It exists as a command line tool that can connect your Gitpod instance with our existing SQ infrastructure. You can use it to:
- login to your Stellar Quest account using discord (or logout),
- get information about the currently logged in user,
- visit the Stellar Quest website,
- fetch new quests when they become available,
- generate a keypair to play a particular quest,
- check and/or verify the quests you've completed,
- get rewards from completing a quest successfully
You can invoke sq from within any of the bash shells in this Gitpod workspace.
The output of sq --help is shown below, for your convenience. You can also
invoke sq <command> --help to get more information on how to use a particular
command.
gitpod /workspace/soroban-pioneer-quest (main) $ sq --help
sq <command>
Commands:
sq login Connect your Stellar Quest account to Gitpod
sq logout Disconnect your Stellar Quest account from Gitpod
sq user Print out information about yourself [aliases: me]
sq open Open the Stellar Quest website
sq pull Pull any new or missing Quests into the /quests directory
sq play Generate a Quest Keypair to play a Quest [aliases: quest]
sq check Check your Quest answer [aliases: verify]
sq submit Submit a signed reward XDR to the Stellar Quest backend
Options:
-h, --help Show help [boolean]
--version Show version number [boolean]
We're confident you'll be able to figure out how to use sq on your own, but
there is one part that deserves some extra attention: the mechanics around
getting a new quest when it becomes available. When we release a new quest,
there are two ways you can pull in the new information: the "easy" sq way, or
the "hard" git way.
All you'll need to do is run sq pull from within any of the bash shells in the
workspace, and it will pull in all the new information for you. The CLI will
attempt to save any changes you've made to the directory, as well.
If you're a git pro, this might be right up your alley. Essentially, what you
need to do is fetch from the origin and incorporate the changes within the
quests/ directory into your working tree. If you want to use the same sequence
of git commands that the SQ CLI uses, here's what it does:
git stash
git fetch --all
git checkout origin/main --theirs /workspace/<the-workspace-name>/quests/
git stash popThere may be some conflict cleanup required, depending on the current state of
your working tree when you run those commands. You could also skip the stash
steps if you don't care to save existing changes within the quests/ directory.
Crucially toward the goal of writing smart contracts for Soroban, your workspace contains a fully configured, ready to go Rust development environment. We have all the tooling, compilers, build processes, and anything else you'll need to hit the ground running. This includes:
- An up-to-date version of the Rust programming language
- This pre-configured VS Code editor, with the required extensions
- The Cargo package manager for Rust crates
- The
wasm32-unknown-unknowntarget for compiling your contracts
You have enough pre-installed to write, debug, test, build, and deploy Soroban
smart contracts from right within this Gitpod workspace. We even have an example
contract ready for you to look through in the quests/0-hello-world/ directory.
You may have noticed the Makefile present in this repository. In it, there are
comments explaining all the pre-configured build rules. To get started quickly,
you can simply run make, make build, or make test from within your root
workspace directory.
Your workspace includes the Soroban CLI, as well. The Soroban CLI can execute Soroban contracts in the same environment the contract will execute on network, however in a local sandbox. This tool is in active development. So, conventions and usage should be expected to change. You can always find the latest about the Soroban CLI here!
Did you know you have access to a Stellar network node right now!? Yeah, right here in your browser, in this workspace there's a Stellar node connected to the "Futurenet" testing network. We've taken care of all the work so you don't have to worry about docker images, starting the service, or anything besides learning to make contracts!
This will come in very handy when you are ready to deploy and share your contracts outside of the sandbox.
Now that you're (at least somewhat) familiar with the lay of the land, you're ready to get questing! Open up that Gitpod, and get to work! Most importantly, have fun!!