Getting started¶

This tutorial will guide you in developing Michelson contracts using Indigo. It will present the features of the language and provide some examples as well.

Requirements¶

This assumes you have some knowledge about Tezos and Michelson, if you don't you can learn about them by reading tezos' documentation and following our Michelson tutorial.

On the software side you will need to install Indigo CLI for compilation and grab the tutorial source code from:

git clone https://gitlab.com/morley-framework/indigo.git
cd indigo/tutorial

Tutorial resources

All the resources for this tutorial, including this documentation and the examples' source code, are located in the tutorial/ subfolder.

Setup recommendations and first steps¶

If you are not a Haskell developer and have no intention of becoming one, you should still be able to follow the tutorial with its examples and write your own contracts as well.

We can start by opening up an interactive shell with Indigo loaded in it.

Cleaner REPL prompt

Before opening the shell you are advised to modify the prompt, as the standard one contains a lot of text. To use a simple one you can simply copy the .ghci file to your home directory:

Source file: .ghci

:set prompt "\ESC[32m>> \ESC[m"
:set prompt-cont ">| "

Provided that you have installed Indigo CLI, you can open a REPL by issuing, from the root directory of the cloned repository:

indigo repl

It will take some time to compile everything the first time around, but it will get faster later on, I promise.

You can now load a source file by using the :load command, we can start by loading the example code provided in this chapter:

Source file: src/Indigo/Tutorial/GettingStarted/Example.hs

module Indigo.Tutorial.GettingStarted.Example
  ( exampleContract
  ) where

import Indigo

exampleContract :: IndigoContract Integer Integer
exampleContract param = defContract do
  a <- new$ 1 int
  storageVar =: param + a

:load src/Indigo/Tutorial/GettingStarted/Example.hs

For these examples, you may receive warnings about missing-home-modules, you can safely ignore these.

Now you have access to the contracts exported by this module (the ones on the list at the top of the file), that in this case is just exampleContract. We'll go through what is the syntax of Indigo, but if you take a quick look at exampleContract you should be able to see that it implements a simple contract that takes an Integer parameter, creates a new variable a of value 1, and finally sets its storage with the sum of param and a. Very simple.

You can compile it and see what's the Michelson code for this (or any other) Indigo contract by using:

printAsMichelson @Integer @Integer exampleContract

or save it to a file with:

saveAsMichelson @Integer @Integer exampleContract "<path-to-file>.tz"

that you can run and deploy on the network!

Note that it is necessary for both to specify the parameter and storage types (in this order), that in this case are just @Integer.

With these tools at your disposal you will be able to create Indigo contracts and compile them to Michelson, just by using the REPL.

If you are ready for it, you should head straight for the next chapter: Basics and Variables.

Technical details: developing using Indigo¶

If you are a Haskell developer interested in developing your own library/contract using Indigo, you'll probably be better off following this tutorial (that will contain more of these technical paragraphs) and checking the Haddock documentation as well.

Generate Haddock documentation

You can generate Haddock documentation for indigo from its folder by using:

make haddock

To be able to write your own project you'll probably just need to

import Indigo

in your modules and pay attention to enabling the right language extensions.

You may not need all of them, but some are necessary and allow the language to be neatly usable, for example RebindableSyntax is what makes it possible to use the do-notation and Haskell's standard if ... then ... else statements (more details on this will come later).