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Continue building locally

Projects deployed through ICP Ninja are temporary; they will only be live for 20 minutes before they are removed. The command-line tool dfx can be used to continue building your ICP Ninja project. dfx can be used to deploy projects to the mainnet for long-term production use. It is designed specifically for building ICP smart contracts and supports every feature of the network.

To migrate your ICP Ninja project off of the web browser and develop it locally, follow these steps.

1. Install developer tools.​

You can install the developer tools natively or develop using Dev Containers.

Option 1: Natively install developer tools​

Installing dfx natively is currently only supported on macOS and Linux systems. On Windows, it is recommended to use Dev Containers below.

  1. Install dfx with the following command:
sh -ci "$(curl -fsSL https://internetcomputer.org/install.sh)"
  1. Install NodeJS.

On Apple Silicon (e.g., Apple M1 chip), make sure you have Rosetta installed (softwareupdate --install-rosetta).

  1. For Rust projects, you will also need to:
  • Install Rust: curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
  • Install candid-extractor: cargo install candid-extractor
  1. For Motoko projects, you will also need to:
  • Install the Motoko package manager Mops: npm i -g ic-mops

Lastly, navigate into your project's directory that you downloaded from ICP Ninja.

Option 2: Dev Containers​

Continue building your projects locally by installing the Dev Container extension in VS Code and Docker.

Make sure Docker is running, then navigate into your project's directory that you downloaded from ICP Ninja and start the Dev Container by selecting Dev-Containers: Reopen in Container in VS Code's command palette (F1 or Ctrl+Shift+P).

Note that local development ports (e.g. the ports used by dfx or vite) are forwarded from the Dev Container to your local machine. In the VS code terminal, use Cmd+Click on the displayed local URLs to open them in your browser. To view the current port mappings, click the "Ports" tab in the VS Code terminal window.

2. Create a local developer identity.​

To manage your project's canisters, it is recommended that you create a local developer identity rather than use the dfx default identity that is not stored securely.

To create a new identity, run the commands:

dfx start --background
dfx identity new IDENTITY_NAME
dfx identity use IDENTITY_NAME

Replace IDENTITY_NAME with your preferred identity name. The first command, dfx start --background starts the local dfx processes, then dfx identity new will create a new identity and return your identity's seed phase. Be sure to save this in a safe, secure location.

The third command, dfx identity use will tell dfx to use your new identity as the active identity. Any canister smart contracts created after running dfx identity use will be owned and controlled by the active identity.

Your identity will have a principal ID associated with it. Principal IDs are used to identify different entities on ICP, such as users and canisters.

Learn more about ICP developer identities.

3. Deploy the project locally.​

Deploy your project to your local developer environment with the commands:

dfx deploy

Your project will be hosted on your local machine. The local canister URLs for your project will be shown in the terminal window as output of the dfx deploy command. You can open these URLs in your web browser to view the local instance of your project.

4. Obtain cycles.​

To deploy your project to the mainnet for long term, public accessability, first you will need cycles. Cycles are used to pay for the resources your project uses on the mainnet, such as storage and compute.

This cost model is known as ICP's reverse gas model, where developers pay for their project's gas fees rather than users pay for their own gas fees. This model provides an enhanced end user experience since they do not need to hold tokens or sign transactions when using a dapp deployed on ICP. Learn how much a project may cost by using the pricing calculator.

Cycles can be obtained through:

5. Deploy to the mainnet.​

Once you have cycles to deploy your project to the mainnet, run the command:

dfx deploy --network ic

After your project has been deployed to the mainnet, it will continuously require cycles to pay for the resources it uses. You will need to top up your project's canisters or set up automatic cycles management through a service such as CycleOps.

If your project's canisters run out of cycles, they will be removed from the network.

Next steps​

Once your project has been deployed using dfx, you may want to learn about:

Additional examples​

Additional code examples and sample applications can be found in the DFINITY examples repo.