Book Image

Blockchain Quick Start Guide

By : Xun (Brian) Wu, Weimin Sun
Book Image

Blockchain Quick Start Guide

By: Xun (Brian) Wu, Weimin Sun

Overview of this book

Blockchain is a technology that powers the development of decentralized applications.This technology allows the construction of a network with no single control that enables participants to make contributions to and receive benefits from the network directly. This book will give you a thorough overview of blockchain and explain how a blockchain works.You will begin by going through various blockchain consensus mechanisms and cryptographic hash functions. You will then learn the fundamentals of programming in Solidity – the defacto language for developing decentralize, applications in Ethereum. After that, you will set up an Ethereum development environment and develop, package, build, and test campaign-decentralized applications.The book also shows you how to set up Hyperledger composer tools, analyze business scenarios, design business models, and write a chain code. Finally, you will get a glimpse of how blockchain is actually used in different real-world domains. By the end of this guide, you will be comfortable working with basic blockchain frameworks, and develop secure, decentralized applications in a hassle-free manner.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Setting up an Ethereum development environment


Follow these instructions to obtain the Ethereum development tools and start up an Ethereum private local blockchain environment (primarily used to run/deploy your smart contract to a local blockchain).

Installing Truffle

Open up the command line and run the following command:

npm install -g truffle

Installing Ganache

Open up the command line and install Ganache's command-line interface as follows:

npm install -g ganache-cli

Creating a Truffle project

To initialize a new DApp project, we can run the truffle init command to initialize an empty Truffle project. This will create the DApp directory structure, including apps, contracts, and tests with Truffle configurations. Since Truffle Boxes provide many working templates, in our DApp example, we will use pet-shop box—a JQuery version of a JavaScript UI library—to develop our crowdfunding DApp example. 

Create a folder called Crowdfunding, open a command-line prompt, navigate to the  Crowdfunding folder...