Developer Setup

This section examines tooling and provides setup instructions for working with the Movement blockchain and the various examples in covered in this booklet.

The Move ecosystem

The budding Move ecosystem sports a variety of developer friendly tools. As we list off tools that will be relevant to this booklet, keep in mind that there are number of projects we have not included.

Virtual machines

As previously discussed, there are several popular virtual machine implementations available for Move development--each of with is paired with particular blockchain. Besides the Movement VM, the most well-known Move virtual machines are Move VM, Aptos VM, and Sui VM

We provide a comparison of these different virtual machines in our docs.

When selecting a virtual machine for development it's important to consider performance, ease of use, and stability. Aptos VM built upon the original and stable Move VM to provide an improved developer experience. The Movement VM builds upon Aptos VM to provide improved performance.

CLIs

There are three CLIs worthy of note in the Move language development space. All support building, testing, deploying, and running smart contracts.

  • move: the original CLI for Move development.
  • aptos: the CLI for Aptos development.
  • movement: our very own CLI which is currently compatible with the Aptos CLI.

In this booklet we will be working with movement. If you ever need help working with movement you can run movement --help or movement <command> --help for more information.

Package managers

You can manage Move dependencies by adding them directly to your Move.toml file. 

[package]
name = "hello_world"
version = "0.0.0"

[dependencies]
AptosFramework = {  git = "https://github.com/movemntdev/aptos-core.git", subdir = "aptos-vm/aptos-move/aptos-framework", rev = "testnet" }

[addresses]
std =  "0x1"
hello_blockchain = "_"

Our version of the AptosFramework is slightly different from the upstream at https://github.com/aptos-labas/aptos-core.git. Please be mindful that, while our goal is to support the latest version of the Aptos Framework, we may occasionally lag behind the upstream--resulting in incompatibilities.

IDE

There are several useful development enviroments for Move. This book will be geared towards using VsCode because of the its developer container features and its Move analyzer. However, syntax highlighting has been implemented for other IDEs including Vim.

Our Setup

We'll be using the movement CLI and VsCode most-often running the movement-dev Docker container from (mvlbs/m1)[https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/mvlbs/m1/general].

To get started...

  1. Clone the repo from which this book originates: https://github.com/movemntdev/movement-hack
  2. Open the repo in VsCode.
  3. Reopen the directory using the movement devcontainer.

Alternatively, when working with movement-dev you may:

docker image pull mvlbs/m1
docker run -it -v "$(pwd):/workspace" mvlbs/m1 /bin/bash

We will also occasionally use Rust, TypeScript, and Python to complete various programming examples.

Setting Up Your Own Environment

While we recommend using the above, if you want to set up your own project environment, you can install the movement CLI and then run movement init in your chosen directory. This will create a .movement profile. You can then add a Move.toml and a sources directory to get started.