Solidity Web Deployment Automation Tool

This tool is built on top of truffle-suite & express.js and is meant for facilitating the development of smart contracts for web applications. It intends to eliminate the need to copy paste contract ABI's and contract addresses into front-end javascripts scripts. Instead, it automatically creates a separate javascript for each contract, which is initialized with it's ABI and contract address. These scripts are then injected into the HTML (app/web/index.html), thus making it immediately accessible to other scripts. One of the biggest advantages of using this tool is, that all changes to the smart contract in solidity, are automatically updated in the front-end once solidity-web deploy is executed.

NPM Package

npm i solidity-web

How to get started:

In the root folder

1. Initialize truffle
It will generate contracts and migrations folders.

truffle init

2. Uncomment network configurations in truffle-config.js

networks: {
     development: {
      host: "127.0.0.1",     // Localhost (default: none)
      port: 8545,            // Standard Ethereum port (default: none)
      network_id: "*",       // Any network (default: none)
     },
...
}

3. Run the Ethereum Node

$ ganache-cli

4. Implement your solidity smart contracts in the contracts folder
The migration files are autogenerated. They can be customized after deployment (step 5) and be redeployed again to update changes.

5. Initialize your contracts in another terminal

$ solidity-web init

6. Deploy your contracts
The command below will deploy contracts and use the default configurations as defined in truffle-config.js (step 2).

$ solidity-web deploy

Custom port and host for the webserver can be set as follows:

$ solidity-web deploy web-host=<host> web-port=<port-number>

This command calls truffle's truffle migrate command underneath, which compiles the .sol files and creates a build folder with json files. On top of this, the solidity-web tool will generate an app folder, which contains the server- and client-side implementation. The app.js file is the server-side code, which launches the container. It can be changed to add rest functionality or or frontend code (HTML/Javascript/CSS). The contracts.js file creates a reference for each smart-contract. For demonstration purposes, an index.html is already present and references all smart-contract instances defined in contract.js.

7. Start the express webserver

$ node app/web/app.js

The default url is http://localhost:8181