This repository contains the various components and some documentation for the Plutus Platform, providing smart contract functionality for the Cardano blockchain.

Talk to us! We're active on the Cardano forum. Tag your post with the plutus tag so we'll see it.

Do use the Github issue tracker for bugs and feature requests, but keep other discussions to the forum.

More detailed information for those who want to actually work on the codebase is in CONTRIBUTING.

IMPORTANT

You will almost certainly want to add the IOHK binary cache to your Nix configuration. This will speed up builds a lot, since many things will have been built already by our CI.

If you have got this set up properly you should only end up locally building packages that you have edited. The build should not take hours!

Put the following in /etc/nix/nix.conf, or ~/.config/nix/nix.conf if you are a trusted user (if you don't know what that means, just use /etc/nix/nix.conf):

substituters        = https://hydra.iohk.io https://cache.nixos.org/
trusted-public-keys = hydra.iohk.io:f/Ea+s+dFdN+3Y/G+FDgSq+a5NEWhJGzdjvKNGv0/EQ= cache.nixos.org-1:6NCHdD59X431o0gWypbMrAURkbJ16ZPMQFGspcDShjY=

default.nix defines a package set containing all the packages in this repository. These can be built directly. For example:

nix build -f default.nix localPackages.language-plutus-core

A variety of other artifacts are also defined in this way. Notably, the Plutus Core specification is found at docs.plutus-core-spec, and the combined Haddock for all the packages in the repository is at docs.combined-haddock.

Docs are built by hydra. The latest docs for plutus core master branch can be found at https://hydra.iohk.io/job/serokell/plutus/language-plutus-core.x86_64-linux/latest

You can also build the docs yourself locally. For example:

# Haddock for language-plutus-core
nix build -f default.nix localPackages.language-plutus-core.doc
# Combined Haddock for all our packages
nix build -f default.nix doc.combined-haddock

The combined Haddocks are deployed to the Github Pages page.

Deploying the docs means committing to the gh-pages branch. You can do this automatically by running ./deploy-docs.sh, and pushing the result if it looks good.

Definitions of some technical terms and names used throughout this project.

• Extended UTxO
  • The ledger model on which the Plutus Platform is based.
• On-chain code
  • Code written as part of a smart contract which executes on the chain during transaction validation.
• Off-chain code
  • Code written as part of a smart contract which executes off the chain, usually in a user's wallet.
• Plutus Core
  • A small functional programming language designed to run as on-chain code.
• Plutus IR
  • An intermediate language that compiles to Plutus Core, for use as a target language for compiler writers.
• Plutus Platform
  • The combined software support for writing smart contracts, including:
    • Libraries for writing off-chain code in Haskell.
    • Libraries for writing on-chain code in Plutus Tx.
    • Emulator support for testing smart contracts.
• Plutus Tx
  • A subset of Haskell which is compiled into Plutus Core.