How To Setup Soroban Dev Environment On Windows

Are you a Windows user looking to explore the capabilities of Soroban, the innovative smart contracts platform designed for scalability and ease-of-use? In this tutorial, we'll guide you through the steps to set up your Soroban developer environment on Windows - regardless of whether you plan to use it with Stellar or other blockchains, L2s, or permissioned ledgers.

Install Rust

Before you can begin developing on Soroban, the innovative smart contracts platform built entirely in Rust, you'll need to ensure that Rust and its package manager, cargo, are properly installed on your Windows machine.Here are the steps to do so:

1. Go to the official Rust website at https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install

1. Download and Run the downloaded installer file and follow the on-screen instructions to complete the installation process.(Note : You'll notice that there are two versions available - 32-bit and 64-bit. Choose according to the windows system you are using)
2. During the installation, you will be prompted to select the default components to install. Make sure to select the "rustup" component, which includes the Rust compiler and cargo package manager.
3. After the installation is complete, open a new command prompt or PowerShell window and type rustc --version to verify that Rust has been installed correctly.
4. After Rust has been installed correctly,we need to add the WebAssembly target to your Rust installation, type rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown in your command prompt.

Install Visual Studio C++ Build tools

After Rust has been installed and configured properly, we need to install Visual Studio C++ Build tools. Visual Studio C++ Build tools are necessary because we will be installing soroban-cli, and in the soroban-cli crates, there are some crates that require C++ to compile. To install Visual Studio C++ Build tools, here are the steps:

1. Download the Build Tools from the official Microsoft website at https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/visual-cpp-build-tools/
2. Run the installation wizard, When asked which workloads to install, include:

• “Desktop Development with C++”
• The Windows 10 or 11 SDK

Install the Soroban CLI

After Visual Studio C++ Build tools installed properly, finally we can Install the Soroban CLI. Soroban cli is a command-line tool that allows you to deploy contracts,interact with deployed contracts, set different identities to sign with, set different networks, and generate new keys on Soroban.
To install Soroban CLI,use this command :

cargo install --locked --version 0.6.0 soroban-cli

After the installation is complete,use soroban command to verify the installation.

Conclusion

That's it! You can now start writing your Soroban smart contract using your preferred code editor. Once you have written your code, you can use the Soroban CLI to deploy the contract to the Soroban Futurenet, invoke, optimize, and more.

Don't hesitate to experiment with different features of Soroban and explore the capabilities of this powerful smart contract platform. Happy coding!