I’ve been meaning to get into Ethereum dev for a while and now that everyone can’t stop buzzing about the price, I imagine other programmers are taking an interest too. Unfortunately my experience is that the internet is littered with incomplete advice and out of date instructions. So after many hours, I’ve assembled a recipe on how to get your local development environment up and running. If you want to skip the justification for using this and jump straight to the instructions, follow this link. If you have a github account and appreciate the gist, please be kind enough to star.

What you need to know before reading this

You should understand what a blockchain is, what distinguishes Ethereum from Bitcoin and what the words “testnet” and “full node” mean. You should also know what gas is and how it relates to ether via the gas price.

Why use this when you can just follow the Ethereum.org tutorials?

The main Ethereum website has some really nice examples to get you off to a running start. The problem is that writing and testing any smart contracts requires you to first download the wallet, Mist, and then proceed to run a full node using either the testnet or the real blockchain. The test net alone is very very big and my Ubuntu partition was running out of space. The time to sync was also excruciatingly long.I looked around online for hours deciphering how to set up my own testnet locally. There was no one good tutorial so after much stackoverflow hopping, I eventually assembled the recipe linked in this article. I proceeded to start my own private node and in less than a minute had mined 390 ether. Fake, local ether obviously, but good enough for a developer’s needs.

Warning

I did this all in my fellow South African’s Linux distribution, Ubuntu, and I’d recommend you do so, too. But the instructions should work in all operating systems (with a bit of tweaking for windows).

There are some things I take for granted but only because a quick google search would do the trick.

Hope this helps! Please remember to star and recommend and all those nice social media things that spread the love, algorithmically. May Vitalik smile on your endevours and may Satoshi keep you hidden.

Here’s the gist again in case you scrolled past the above.