We’re excited to announce that the beta 2 release of Buidler is ready!

What is Buidler though?

Buidler is an extensible developer tool that helps Solidity developers increase productivity by reliably bringing together the tools they want. Take a look at our vision post or head over to Github to learn more.

“Okay, but what is it good for exactly?”, you may ask.

As an Ethereum developer, Buidler allows you to streamline your development workflow by making it easy to incorporate other tools into your process, as well as granting you the flexibility you need to adapt the tools to your needs. Exactly which dependencies and tools you use is up to you. Buidler will just help you orchestrate them.

We achieve this through user-defined tasks, and plugins. A lot of plugins.

Buidler Beta 2

This release includes significant progress on one of Buidler’s most requested features: TypeScript support. Before this release plugins could be written in TypeScript, but not tests or configuration. This means your handy tasks can now be TypeScript 🥳.

The default solc version was updated to v0.5.5 and its default evmVersion to Petersburg, and we've executed a key refactoring around the developer experience of building plugins. Before the beta 2 it was a bit of a hassle, needing to juggle around npm peer dependencies issues with linking wizardry. Now the experience is much smoother and welcoming to plugin developers.

To celebrate this improved development UX, we’ve put up bounties on Gitcoin for two plugins we’d like to see built: buidler-etherscan and buidler-solc-docker.

The Etherscan plugin will integrate Etherscan’s API to allow developers to easily verify the source code of their smart contracts from the command line. All without dealing with compiler configuration or version issues.

The docker solc plugin will enable the running of a natively-compiled solc inside a docker container for improved compilation speeds.

The Ethereum Foundation and Gitcoin are providing the funding for these bounties and we’re profoundly grateful to them. Both plugins should take a few days each, and they’re worth a combined 1600 USD!

If these sound like fun weekend projects to you then go ahead, build your first open source plugin for Buidler and get paid for doing so 🤑.

For any questions or feedback you may have, you can find us in the Buidler Support Telegram group.