Requirements: Anatomy

The developer-exercises repository contains exercises for each of the lessons presented here in the Gym.

The repository itself is a cargo workspace. Each of the exercises consists of two separate crates—one for the exercise itself and another for the solution to the exercise.

It is also an NPM workspace, since we are using tryorama for the tests.

Anatomy of an exercise

Each exercise has two folders:

• exercise
• solution

The solution folder contains a complete and working version of the exercise folder. After you solve the exercise you can compare your solution with our solution. Or, if you are really lost, you can take a quick look...

The structure inside the exercise and solution folder are very similar to a real holochain application. So let us review what you see when you open the entries exercise.

  > 1.entries
      > exercise
          > tests
          > workdir
          > zomes
          README.md
          ...
      > solution

The best place to start if you are lost is to read the README file again. It briefly states what you need to do to compile and test the exercise.

The heart of the exercise lies in zomes/exercise. This is a pure and simple Rust project and contains its own Cargo.toml and Cargo.lock file. You start adding Rust code in src/lib.rs

Once you are done adding code you need to compile your Rust code to a WASM binary and package it in a DNA, a holochain specific format. The result will be stored in workdir.

To make your life easy we put together a npm script in the tests/package.json that checks if you are running in the nix-shell and builds the code. To build your zome you only need to run npm run build inside the tests folder.

The tests folder contains a full node/typescript project, complete with package.json,tsconfig.json and a src folder. These tests can be viewed as integration tests. They actually run your compiled DNA in a real holochain conductor. The tests call your code, just like a regular web app would do.

For running the tests we also provided another npm script that checks if you are running in the nix-shell and runs the tests. You only need to call npm test inside the tests folder.

Now you know enough to start the first exercise or you could start by exploring the main concepts of holochain in a hands-on way. Except for a few minor differences, the holochain-gym exercises look and act just like real holochain app projects. If you want to start working on your own holochain apps, separate from the holochain-gym, you can read the next section.

Building your own Holochain app (optional)

If you want to familiarize yourself with a sample Holochain project, clone the Holochain DNA Build Tutorial.

• Look at the folder structure:
  • zomes contains various zomes (holochain modules), each zome is a normal rust crate.
  • workdir contains important Holochain files, defining your DNAs and hApp.
  • tests contains the tests for the DNA.
  • default.nix: this file is really important, as it defines which holochain binaries should be used with this happ. Difference with holochain-gym: In the gym we placed this file at the root of the repository, so you can work on all exercises in the same terminal.
• Enter the nix-shell for this repository by running nix-shell . in the root folder.
• Compile the DNA with:

CARGO_TARGET_DIR=target cargo build --release --target wasm32-unknown-unknown
hc dna pack workdir/dna
hc app pack workdir/happ

Difference with holochain-gym: In the gym we provide a simple build script run_build.sh that checks you are running inside a nix-shell and if so, runs the above steps.

• After compiling, run the tests with:

cd tests
npm install
npm test

Difference with holochain-gym: In the gym we provide a simple test script run_tests.sh that checks you are running inside a nix-shell and if so, runs tests.

You can look at the files of the project, and also play around with all the various commands that hc sandbox offers.