Set Up and Configure Your Environment for Writing Smart Contracts

Stellar smart contracts are small programs written in the Rust programming language. To build and develop contracts you need the following prerequisites:

A Rust toolchain
An editor that supports Rust
Stellar CLI

Install Rust

macOS/Linux
Windows
Other

If you use macOS, Linux, or another Unix-like OS, the simplest method to install a Rust toolchain is to install rustup. Install rustup with the following command.

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Then restart the terminal.

Stellar smart contracts require Rust toolchain v1.84.0 or higher, as the wasm32v1-none target is only available in recent versions. To check your version:

rustc --version

If you need to update:

rustup update stable

Install the target

You’ll need a “target” for which your smart contract will be compiled. Install the wasm32v1-none target (again, this requires Rust v1.84.0 or higher).

rustup target add wasm32v1-none

When you install Rust, the WebAssembly target is installed per-toolchain. If you update your Rust version, you’ll need to reinstall the wasm32v1-none target for the new toolchain.

You can learn more about the finer points of what this target brings to the table, in our page all about the Stellar Rust dialect. This page describes the subset of Rust functionality that is available to you within Stellar smart contract environment.

Configure an editor

Many editors have support for Rust. Visit the following link to find out how to configure your editor: https://www.rust-lang.org/tools Here are the tools to you need to configure your editor:

Visual Studio Code as code editor (or another code editor that supports Rust)
Rust Analyzer for Rust language support
CodeLLDB for step-through-debugging

Install the Stellar CLI

The Stellar CLI can execute smart contracts on futurenet, testnet, mainnet, as well as in a local sandbox.

The latest stable release is available on the Stellar CLI releases page.

Install

There are a few ways to install the latest release of Stellar CLI.

macOS
Linux
Windows

Install using script (macOS, Linux):

curl -fsSL https://github.com/stellar/stellar-cli/raw/main/install.sh | sh

Install with Homebrew (macOS, Linux):

brew install stellar-cli

Install with cargo from source:

cargo install --locked stellar-cli

Install using script (macOS, Linux):

curl -fsSL https://github.com/stellar/stellar-cli/raw/main/install.sh | sh

Install with Homebrew (macOS, Linux):

brew install stellar-cli

Install with cargo from source:

cargo install --locked stellar-cli

Installing from source requires a C build system. To install a C build system on Debian/Ubuntu, use:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y build-essential

Using the installer:

Download the installer from the latest release.
Go to your Downloads folder, double click the installer and follow the wizard instructions.
Restart your terminal to use the stellar command.

Using winget:

winget install --id Stellar.StellarCLI

Install with cargo from source:

cargo install --locked stellar-cli

Report issues and share feedback about the Stellar CLI here.

Documentation

The auto-generated comprehensive reference documentation is available here.

Autocompletion

You can use stellar completion to generate shell completion for different shells. You should absolutely try it out. It will feel like a super power!

Bash
ZSH
fish
PowerShell
Elvish