Write your first Cardano Hello world in just 10 minutes

4 min readAug 2, 2023

Introduction

Starting out Cardano can be daunting when you don’t know the right place to start.

Cardano ecosystem is just in the development stages with not much of the support as we would see in Ethereum, Solana and other popular Blockchain ecosystems.

If you are struggling with getting started , this is your home for Cardano.

Let’s quickly get to the good stuff

Configure Demeter

1. Creating your project

we’ll be using an online development setup for developing stuff because it comes with a lot of pre-configured things like cardanol node and nix which are not easy to setup on local machines.

Go to https://demeter.run/ and create a free account.
After creating an account , your project section might look like this

Don’t worry if you don’t have any project here. you can create one.

Create a new project by clicking “New Project +” Button
Put the name and description as hello world
Select any Cluster and organization of your choice and hit “Build project”.

Your project has been created.

2. Setting up your project

Now go to your “Projects” tab and you’ll see your currently created project.

Click on the “Open” button and you’ll see something like this :

Click on “Create New” button in-front of workloads heading.

Select Workspace .

Toggle to Active to enter repository url.
Sign in to your github and go to following url and fork this repository
https://github.com/input-output-hk/plutus-pioneer-program
In the url tab above , enter the forked repository url
https://github.com/your_github_username/plutus-pioneer-program
replace “your_github_username” with your actual github username.

Now , scroll below select following
- “Plutus Tx” as tool chain.
- “Large” as workspace size
- “preview” network to connect
Click on the create button.

You will see something like this :

Wait for provisioning to end.
Till then scroll down to “connected extensions”, click browse and select “cardano node” on “preview” network to add it to our development environment.
After adding Cardano node , Go to dashboard again and wait for provision to end again.
Now you will see something like this

Click on the right arrow to explore the workload of our project
After provisioning ends , the screen will look like this :

Time to click on the vscode icon and open the workplace.
Open up the new terminal in the new in-browser vscode window and type cd code/Week02` in terminal to switch working directory to Week02’s code.
Run `cabal update` and wait for 2–6 minutes or less to finish it.
Now run `cabal repl` in the terminal and wait it to finish( This will take time e.g ~ 10–20 minutes or maybe more . let it take ).
These commands will install everything we need to get stuff running
If following pop-up shows , just click on “Automatically via ghcp”.