ink!athon Boilerplate

This is a full-stack dApp boilerplate for ink! smart contracts with an integrated frontend. It can be used to quickly start developing your hackathon idea or to scaffold a production-ready Web3 application.

The project is part of a Scio Labs initiative to improve the developer experience in the ink! ecosystem and a proud member of the Aleph Zero EFP. 💜

Other projects include:

create-ink-app CLI (Coming soon)
ink!athon Boilerplate
useInkathon Hooks & Utility Library
zink! Smart Contract Macros

Join the discussion in our Telegram Group 💬

If you want to contribute, please read our Contributor Guidelines 🙏

Table of Contents:

About 📖
Getting started 🚀
Customization 🎨
The Stack 🥞
Live Examples 🌐
Deployment 🚢
1. Environment Variables
2. Contract Deployment
VSCode Setup 🛠
1. Workspace
2. Plugins
DRink! CLI Usage 💧
FAQs & Troubleshooting 💬

About 📖

The boilerplate comes with a small sample ink! Greeter contract which stores a message (the "greeting") and allows anyone to update it. The frontend contains simple UI components to connect your wallet and interact with the contract (i.e. read & write the message). Try it out live on inkathon.xyz.

Getting started 🚀

1. Run the frontend

The frontend works out of the box, without a local node running, as the sample contract is pre-deployed on certain live testnets (i.e. alephzero-testnet and shibuya). Necessary deployment metadata and addresses are provided under contracts/deployments/.

Pre-requisites:

Setup Node.js v18+ (recommended via nvm with nvm install 18)

Install pnpm (recommended via Node.js Corepack or npm i -g pnpm)

Clone this repository

Special Instructions for Windows Users

[!IMPORTANT]
Windows users must either use WSL (recommended) or a custom shell like Git Bash. PowerShell is not supported.

Pre-requisites when using WSL for Linux:

Install WSL and execute all commands in the WSL terminal

Setup Node.js v18+ (recommended via nvm with nvm install 18)

Install the following npm packages globally:

npm i -g npm

npm i -g pnpm node-gyp make

Clone this repository into the WSL file system (e.g. /home/<user>/inkathon).

Tip: You can enter \\wsl$\ in the top bar of the Windows Explorer to access the WSL file system visually.

# Install dependencies (once)
# NOTE: This automatically creates an `.env.local` file
pnpm install

# Start Next.js frontend
pnpm run dev

Optionally, to enable simple-git-hooks (for automatic linting & formatting when committing), you can run the following command once: pnpm simple-git-hooks.

2. Build & deploy contracts on a local node

The contracts/package.json file contains shorthand scripts for building, testing, and deploying your contracts.

Pre-requisites:

Install Rust via the Substrate Docs (skip the "Compile a Substrate node" section)

Install cargo contract

Install substrate-contracts-node

# Set `contracts/` as the active working directory in your terminal
cd contracts

# Build contracts and move artifacts to `contracts/deployments/{contract}/` folders
pnpm run build

# Start local node with persistence (contracts stay deployed after restart)
# NOTE: When using Brave, shields have to be taken down for the UIs
pnpm run node

## IMPORTANT: Open a separate terminal window and keep the node running

# Deploy the contracts on the local node
pnpm run deploy

Alternatively, you can also deploy contracts manually using Contracts UI (pnpm contracts-ui) in the browser.

3. Connect the frontend to the local node

Open the frontend/.env.local file and set the NEXT_PUBLIC_DEFAULT_CHAIN variable to development. Then restart the frontend and you should be able to interact with the contracts deployed on your local node.

Read more about environment variables and all available chain constants in the Environment Variables section below.

Customization 🎨

1. Project Name

There are multiple places where you need to insert your project's name and identifier. Most of these occurrences are highlighted with a /* TODO */ comment in the code. You can easily replace them one by one by installing the todo-tree plugin.

Additionally, there are the following un-highlighted occurrences:

the name of the inkathon.code-workspace file
the package.json's name & metadata in the root directory as well as in the contracts/ and frontend/ packages
the workspace dependency (@inkathon/contracts) defined in frontend/package.json and imported in frontend/src/deployments/deployments.ts

2. Custom Contracts

To replace the default Greeter contract or add a new one, you need to do the following:

Add a new contract directory under contracts/src/
Add it as another workspace member to the contracts/Cargo.toml file
Add another deployment script or adjust contracts/scripts/deploy.ts
Adjust the ContractIds enum and getDeployments function in frontend/src/deployments/deployments.ts

3. Custom Scripts

Adding custom scripts is useful to interact with your contracts or test certain functionality. Therefore, just duplicate & reuse the contracts/scripts/script.template.ts file and run it via pnpm run script <script-name>. This command will run the TypeScript file directly via tsx.

For general scripts, the same environment variable initialization & configuration applies as described below in the Deployment section (e.g. to change the target network).

The Stack 🥞

The Stack in Detail

Monorepo Workspace with contracts/ and frontend/ directories as packages.
Package Manager: pnpm or yarn@stable (Read more in the FAQs section below)
Smart Contract Development: Rust, ink!, cargo-contract, substrate-contracts-node
Frontend: Next.js (app-dir), React, TypeScript
- Contract Interactions: polkadot-js, useInkathon React Hooks & Utility Library (alternatively: useInk)
- Styling: shadcn/ui, tailwindcss
- Linting & Formatting: eslint, prettier, simple-git-hooks, lint-staged
Type-safe contract generation via typechain-polkadot

Styling, linting, and formatting libraries can be fully dropped or replaced with alternatives.

Live Examples 🌐

Below you find live examples that use this boilerplate or have a similar setup inspired by it:

inkathon.xyz – Live demo deployment of this boilerplate
AZERO.ID – Domain Name Service for Aleph Zero and beyond
Multiple hackathon projects from ETHWarsaw, HackOnChain, ETHDam, and the Polkadot ink! Hackathon.

Deployment 🚢

Spinning up a deployment via Vercel is pretty straightforward as the necessary settings are already configured in vercel.json. If you haven't cloned the repository yet, you can also use the Deploy button below to create a new repository from this template.

Alternatively, you can also use the provided Dockerfiles to deploy to any hosting provider of your choice. Read more here.

Environment Variables

All environment variables are imported from process.env in frontend/src/config/environment.ts and re-exported from there. For improved type safety, Always only import environment variables from @/config/environment and never directly from process.env.

Environment Variables	Default Values	Description
`NEXT_PUBLIC_DEFAULT_CHAIN` *️⃣	️`alephzero-testnet`	The network (Substrate-based chain) the frontend should connect to by default and what contract deployment artifacts to import.
`NEXT_PUBLIC_PRODUCTION_MODE`	`false`	Optional boolean flag to differentiate production environment (e.g. for SEO or Analytics).
`NEXT_PUBLIC_URL`	`http://localhost:3000`	Optional string that defines the base URL of the frontend (will be auto-inferred from Vercel environment variables).
`NEXT_PUBLIC_SUPPORTED_CHAINS`	–	Optional array with network identifers (e.g. `["alephzero-testnet", "shibuya"]`) that are supported by the frontend, if the dApp is supposed to be multi-chain.

*️⃣ Required

Supported Chains

One key element making this boilerplate so flexible is the usage of environment variables to configure the active network in the frontend. This is done by setting the NEXT_PUBLIC_DEFAULT_CHAIN variable in the frontend/.env.local file, or in the deployment settings respectively.

If your network is not provided by the use-inkathon library, you can add it manually by creating a new SubstrateChain object. If you think a chain is missing, please open an issue or PR.

Important

All supported chain constants can be found here in the scio-labs/use-inkathon repository.

Contract Deployment

In the Getting Started section above, we've already deployed the sample Greeter contract on a local node. To target a live network, we can use the CHAIN environment variable when running the deploy script.

CHAIN=alephzero-testnet pnpm run deploy

Further, dynamically loaded environment files with the .env.{chain} naming convention can be used to add additional configuration about the deployer account.

# .env.alephzero-testnet
ACCOUNT_URI=bottom drive obey lake curtain smoke basket hold race lonely fit walk//Alice

When running the same script again, this deployer account defined there will be used to sign the extrinsic.

Warning

These files are gitignored by default, but you should still be extra cautious when adding sensitive information to them.

VSCode Setup 🛠

Workspace

It can be helpful to develop in VSCode by opening the workspace file inkathon.code-workspace instead of just the plain directory. This approach offers multiple advantages, like sections in the file explorer, or shortcut actions to open the terminal in the correct directory.

Consider installin the zoma.vscode-auto-open-workspace extension to automatically open the workspace file when opening the directory.

Plugins

Additionally, the VSCode plugins listed below are recommended as they can be very helpful when working with this boilerplate.

All Recommended Plugins

Plugin Name	Description
`dbaeumer.vscode-eslint`	Adds ESLint editor support.
`esbenp.prettier-vscode`	Adds Prettier editor support.
`bradlc.vscode-tailwindcss`	Adds tailwindcss editor support.
`rust-lang.rust-analyzer`	Adds Rust language support.
`ink-analyzer.ink-analyzer`	Adds ink! language support.
`tamasfe.even-better-toml`	Adds `.toml` file support.
`gruntfuggly.todo-tree`	Lists all `TODO` comments in your workspace.
`wayou.vscode-todo-highlight`	Highlights `TODO` comments in your workspace.
`mikestead.dotenv`	Adds syntax highlighting for `.env` files.

DRink! CLI Usage 💧

The DRink! CLI is a convenient command line tool that helps you to play with your ink! contracts without setting up a local node.

Install drink-cli via cargo install drink-cli --force --locked.
Build your contracts via pnpm run build.
Run the following command to prepare & open the CLI for your contract: pnpm run drink-cli <contract-name>.

Then, just use the help command to see all available commands and start interacting with your contract. For example, you can deploy the greeter example contract via d --constructor default or d "Hello World".

FAQs & Troubleshooting 💬

Which package managers are supported? Do I have to use pnpm?

For monorepo workspaces, pnpm is likely the fastest and most reliable choice. When using it though, it's strongly recommended everyone on the team uses it. No installs should be performed nor any other lock files should be committed.

As an alternative, yarn is also supported and can be used for installation. Caveats when using yarn:

Only the stable version of yarn (currently v3) is supported, not yarn classic (v1).
yarn.lock files should be committed instead of .pnpm-lock.yaml files.
The pnpm CLI is still used in many package.json scripts, so these would have to be adjusted manually.

[!IMPORTANT]
As npm lacks support for the workspace import protocol, it's not compatible with ink!athon.

How to solve `Cannot find module './greeter/development.ts'`?

Sometimes, Next.js doesn't pick up changes (i.e. file creations) in the contracts/deployments/{contract}/ folders correctly. E.g., when you just deployed on a local node for the first time and set the frontend's .env.local to connect to the development network.

To fix this, you can delete the build cache at frontend/.next. This is currently the only solution and will force Next.js to rebuild the project and pick up the new files.

[!NOTE]
To prevent this behavior, the contracts/package.json file contains a small postinstall script that creates an empty development.ts file if none exists.

How to approach styling?

Currently it offers styling via the following options out of the box:

shadcn/ui - Re-usable components built using Radix UI and Tailwind CSS.
Vanilla Tailwind CSS styled styles via className and *.module.(s)css files.
Default (S)CSS styles.

[!INFO]
This boilerplate tries to stay as un-opinonated in regards to styling, which means you can use any styling or component library.

How do type-safe contract interactions work?

With typechain-polkadot, types for each contract (TypeScript files) are created upon build (via the build script or build-all.sh command). You can suppress this behavior by passing --skip-types.

They are stored under contracts/typed-contracts/ and imported directly from the frontend. Then, via the new useRegisteredTypedContract hook from useInkathon instances with pre-defined api, network-dependant contract address, and injected signer are being created. See greeter-contract-interactions.tsx for an example.

Resources to learn more about Substrate, ink!, and polkadot.js

scio-labs/inkathon