Generic Script project

Section Goal
  • create and initialize project for the Generic Script Descartes DApp

Introduction

In the previous tutorial, we learned how to build a Descartes DApp that is capable of receiving input data as a string and performing a mathematical calculation using the Linux bc tool. In this project, we will generalize this idea to show how Descartes can be leveraged to allow a smart contract to perform a generic computation by receiving an arbitrary script as input and using any interpreter of choice, such as Python or Lua, including any required libraries, to execute it. And without compromising on decentralization.

DISCLAIMER

Despite being included as a tutorial, it should be noted that this is NOT the recommended way of implementing a DApp using Descartes. It usually makes little sense to waste resources building a full script on-chain - all possible logic should rather be moved over to the off-chain Cartesi Machine. However, this strategy is used here for the purposes of illustrating Descartes' potential for running any generic computation in a verifiable way. Furthermore, this approach allows us to play with the possibilities without the need of building a different machine for every script we want to try out.

As always, a full implementation of this tutorial is available in the Descartes Tutorials GitHub repo.

Initializing the DApp project

As we did for the other DApps, we will first initialize our project by creating an appropriate directory along with its basic internal structure:

mkdir generic-script
cd generic-script
mkdir contracts
mkdir deploy
mkdir cartesi-machine

We should not forget to add the necessary dependencies to the Descartes SDK, Hardhat, Ethers and TypeScript:

yarn add @cartesi/descartes-sdk@1.1.1
yarn add ethers hardhat hardhat-deploy hardhat-deploy-ethers --dev
yarn add typescript ts-node --dev

Last but not least, let's create a hardhat.config.ts file, so that we can properly interact with our development environment's Ethereum instance and leverage Descartes' deployment resources:

import { HardhatUserConfig } from "hardhat/config";


import "hardhat-deploy";
import "hardhat-deploy-ethers";


const config: HardhatUserConfig = {
  networks: {
    localhost: {
      url: "http://localhost:8545",
    },
  },
  solidity: {
    version: "0.7.4",
  },
  external: {
    contracts: [
      {
        artifacts: "node_modules/@cartesi/descartes-sdk/export/artifacts",
        deploy: "node_modules/@cartesi/descartes-sdk/dist/deploy",
      },
    ],
    deployments: {
      localhost: ["../descartes-env/deployments/localhost"],
    },
  },
  namedAccounts: {
    deployer: {
      default: 0,
    },
    alice: {
      default: 0,
    },
    bob: {
      default: 1,
    },
  },
};


export default config;