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0.5 Introduction to tooling

Beginner
Tutorial

Developer tools come in different formats, like command-line tools or web-based development environments.

The video corresponding to this tutorial is outdated.

In this Developer Liftoff series, you will primarily use ICP Ninja, a web-based IDE that enables you to develop from any device, anywhere, and deploy your project to the mainnet temporarily for free. Certain tutorials will use a local developer environment and the CLI tool dfx.

ICP Ninja​

ICP Ninja is a web-based development environment that doesn't require downloading tools or configuring a developer environment. Through ICP Ninja, you can deploy applications to the mainnet for free. Applications deployed through ICP Ninja are temporary and will be removed after 20 minutes; however they do not cost cycles, making ICP Ninja a valuable tool for getting started quickly.

How does ICP Ninja work?​

When canisters are deployed from ICP Ninja, they temporarily borrow resources from a canister pool and are allotted a small amount of cycles that can be used during the canister's deployment. The canister pool is referred to as the "playground" network, and developers using dfx in a local environment can deploy canisters to this temporary canister pool through the CLI flag --playground.

Canisters deployed to the playground can run for 20 minutes; after 20 minutes, the canister will be uninstalled and the resources borrowed are returned to the playground's canister pool.

Using the playground, either through ICP Ninja or the CLI, is a great way to be able to deploy a canister quickly for short, small-scale testing or just to get familiar with the deployment process and how to interact with a canister without needing to complete additional deployment steps, such as acquiring cycles.

Since the playground is designed for testing purposes, it has several restrictions that you should be aware of. These restrictions are:

  • Wasm files can't be gzipped.
  • Wasm files for deployed canisters will be analyzed to remove any potentially expensive or malicious operations.
  • Canisters can use at most 1GB of memory.
  • Canisters can call the management canister to manage themselves without being the controller.
  • Deployed canisters expire after 20 minutes.

IC SDK​

The IC SDK is used to develop applications in a local development environment, then deploy them to ICP. It is comprised of:

  • dfx: Command-line tool for creating and managing projects, developer identities, and using cycles.

  • dfxvm: A version manager for dfx.

  • moc: The Motoko compiler for Motoko canister development.

The IC SDK is natively supported on Linux or macOS 12.* Monterey and newer. Windows users can use the IC SDK with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL 2).

dfx​

dfx is the primary tool used by developers for developing ICP projects. dfx supports local development and local deployment through a local instance of the ICP replica that can be used to deploy and test canisters on your local machine.

To deploy canisters to the mainnet or make calls to canisters already deployed on the mainnet, the --network ic flag can be used with most dfx commands.

dfxvm​

dfxvm is a CLI tool used for installing and switching between different versions of dfx. It enables developers to pivot between different projects that are built with different dfx versions.

ICP AstronautNeed help?

Did you get stuck somewhere in this tutorial, or do you feel like you need additional help understanding some of the concepts? The ICP community has several resources available for developers, like working groups and bootcamps, along with our Discord community, forum, and events such as hackathons. Here are a few to check out: