Ethereum Solidity modern development environment

Here are the list of tips and tricks to develop solidity in a modern way (understand back to 2017 year 🙂 )

IDE Support

I recommend you to use the excellent Jetbrains Webstorm or Intellij IDEA with the folllowing free plugins:

• Intellij-Solidity see https://github.com/intellij-solidity/intellij-solidity
• Solidity Solhint Plugin allow to enable Solhint inspection capabilities in your project. It highlight of warnings / errors found by the linter in editor during code modification.
• Refactoring in Javascript is excellent but still not supported in Solidity,

Auto-completion of solidity

Your smart contract code also deserve to be recognized by your IDE and in your test-cases. In order to enjoy auto-completion you’ll have to use Soltsice ()https://github.com/dbrainio/Soltsice) to convert Solidity code to TypeScript at compile time.

Add to your package.json

"scripts": {
 "types": "soltsice build/contracts types",
},
"devDependencies": {
 "soltsice": "^0.9.8", 
}

After any major changes to your Solidity code, run “npn run types”, once done you can enjoy auto-completion in javascript and in solidity!

Auto-completion in Javascript

Chances are high that you are writing a lot of unit tests, integration tests…I hope you do. In order to get hint from the IDE, you’ll need under IDEA/WebStorm settings – Javascript – to add the following libraries by clicking [ download ]

mocha, jasmine, chai, chai-as-promised, babel-core, add as much as your are using in your code.

FYI by doing so  you just add typedscript packages from DefinitelyTyped GitHub project.

Auto-completion of Web3 

Web3 is the Ethereum compatible JavaScript API which implements the Generic JSON RPC spec. It’s available on npm as a node module, for bower and component as an embeddable js and as a meteor.js package.

There currently no official Web3 type definition included in the DefinitelyTyped project. But there is one package good enough even if in Beta at https://www.npmjs.com/package/web3-typescript-typings

Debugger

Only the Truffle debugger for now http://truffleframework.com/docs/getting_started/debugging 

Running unit test

Using Karma is still a work in progress with TruffleSuite. A karma-trufflesuite runner is missing (https://github.com/karma-runner) but i am developing one!

CI in Travis with Docker, .travis.yml

dist: trusty 
sudo: required group: beta 
language: node_js 
node_js:   
 - "8" cache:   
 directories:     
  - node_modules 
 before_script:   
   - truffle version 
 script:   
   - npm run lint   
   - npm run test 
 notifications:   
  slack:     
   rooms:   
    - secure: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx     
on_success: change     
on_failure: always     
on_pull_requests: false

Easy testing of EVM Time shifting  with Truffle snapshot/restore

Buggy right now, but may be solved soon see https://github.com/trufflesuite/ganache-cli/issues/390 

This is a work in progress, i will continue trying to improve my day to day Solidity toolbox! If you have more tips, feel free to use the comment section below.