Writing My First Chia Blockchain Program — Part 2 — Setup

I recently started learning Chialisp. Join me as I deploy my first program to the Chia blockchain and feel free to ask questions.

Photo by Francesco Gallarotti on Unsplash

Introduction

In part 1, we went over the key concepts in Chialisp.

In this second part of the series, we will go over how to setup your development environment so you can get to writing Chialisp!

Step 1: Install the Chia Network

1. Download the Chia application here.
2. Install the downloadable executable.
3. Make sure you can access via the terminal by running the following command: chia -h
   If chia is not accessible via the terminal set it up using the following commands:
   On MacOS: PATH=/Applications/Chia.app/Contents/Resources/app.asar.unpacked/daemon:$PATH.
   On Windows: C:\Users\ * Your User * \AppData\Local\chia-blockchain\app-1.1.3\resources\app.asar.unpacked\daemon\chia.exe

Step 2: Connect to the Chia Testnet

Chia has a testnet which is the recommended place to try out new chia smart coins during development since it uses test money (TXCH) instead of real money (XCH).

We can configure our chia software to use the testnet by running the following commands:

chia init
chia configure -t true

Step 3: Create a new wallet

Open the Chia GUI (downloaded in Step 1). When you open the application, it should look something like this:

We can create a test wallet by clicking on the “Create a New Private Key” button. That will generate a new mnemonic seed for our test wallet.

You can also checkout your wallet information on the command line using:

chia keys show

Or if you want to see your mnemonic seed you can use:

chia keys show —-show-mnemonic-seed