Why Vyper?
Vyper is a contract-oriented, pythonic programming language that targets the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)
Vyper is a relatively new language that has been written with a focus on security, simplicity and audibility. It’s written in a Pythonic way which appeals to me and as a more secure alternative to Solidity I think it has a lot of potential. I plan on writing more about working with Vyper in the future.
Truffle — Too Much Of A Sweet Tooth?
I’ve recently finished working on a hackathon project and completed the 2018 ConsenSys Academy and during that time, for better or worse, I’ve become pretty accustomed to using the Truffle development environment for writing code, testing and deploying— it just makes life easier.
So, in an ideal world I’d like to use Truffle for working with Vyper. After a bit of investigation I found this ERC721 Vyper implementation by Maurelian who did the work to make it Truffle compatible. I thought it might be useful to document the build process for use in other projects.
How To — Vyper Development Using Truffle
Install Vyper
The first step is to make sure Vyper is installed locally. If this has been done before you can skip — you can check by running the $ vyper -h command. There are various ways to install, including using PIP, the docs are here. I’m using a Mac and did the following:
Set up virtual environment:
$ virtualenv -p python3.6 --no-site-packages ~/vyper-venv
Remeber to activate the environmet:
$ source ~/vyper-venv/bin/activate
Then in my working dir:
$ git clone https://github.com/ethereum/vyper.git $ cd vyper $ make $ make test
Install Truper
Next I installed Truper, a tool written by Maurelian to compile Vyper contracts to Truffle compatible artifacts. It uses Vyper which is why we installed it previously. (See the next section for details of what it’s doing). To install run:
$ npm i -g truper
Compiling, Testing, Deploying
From your project dir (you can clone the ERC-721 project for a quick test).
Run ganache test network:
$ ganache-cli
Compile any Solidity contracts as usual using:
$ truffle compile
Compile Vyper contracts using the command:
$ truper
* this must be called from the project dir and you must have the virtual environment you built Vyper in running.Truffle tests can be written and run the usual way, i.e.:
Use artifacts in test files:
const NFToken = artifacts.require('NFToken.vyper');
Run tests using: $ truffle test
Truffle migrations also work the usual way. For example I used the following migration file to deploy to ganache:
2_deploy_contracts.js
const NFToken = artifacts.require('NFToken.vyper');
const TokenReceiverMockVyper = artifacts.require('NFTokenReceiverTestMock.vyper');
module.exports = function(deployer) {
deployer.deploy(NFToken, [], []);
deployer.deploy(TokenReceiverMockVyper);
};
$ truffle migrate
What’s Going On
Truper uses Vyper which is why we installed it in the first step. If we look at https://github.com/maurelian/truper/blob/master/index.js we can see Truper is creating Truffle artifact files for each Vyper contract and writing them to the ./build/contracts folder of the project.
Truffle Artifact Files
These *.json files contain descriptions of their respective smart contracts. The description includes:
- Contract name
- Contract ABI (Application Binary Interface — a list of all the functions in the smart contracts along with their parameters and return values). Created by Truper using:
$ vyper -f json file.vy - Contract bytecode (compiled contract data). Created by Truper using:
$ vyper -f bytecode file.vy - Contract deployed bytecode (the latest version of the bytecode which was deployed to the blockchain). Created by Truper using:
$ vyper -f bytecode_runtime file.vy - The compiler version with which the contract was last compiled. (Doesn’t appear to get added until deployed.)
- A list of networks onto which the contract has been deployed and the address of the contract on each of those networks. (Doesn’t appear to get added until deployed.)
Maurelian describes it as a hacky stop-gap but it works so thank you!