Compiling Helios sources

The recommended way to compile Helios sources is to use the library directly. This approach makes it easier to maintain a single-source-of-truth version of your contract in client-side dApps.

First step is to write your contract as a js literal string. For example:

const src = `
spending always_succeeds

func main(_, _, _) -> Bool {
    true
}`

Then you can create a Helios Program instance:

// at top of js file
import * as helios from "helios"

...

const program = helios.Program.new(src)

The Program instantiation will perform syntax and type checking, but won't actually do the compilation into the on-chain format. For that you need to call the compile method first:

const simplify = true

const myUplcProgram = program.compile(simplify)

Note: If simplify is true the resulting program is optimized for production. If simplify is false no optimizations are performed and print expressions aren't removed, which makes the resulting program more suitable for debugging.

Here myUplcProgram is an instance of UplcProgram (uplc stands for Untyped PLutus Core). A UplcProgram instance has methods for running, profiling, hashing, and serializing the contained Plutus-Core program.

Now you can serialize the UplcProgram into a JSON string that can be used by cardano-cli:

console.log(myUplcProgram.serialize())

// prints '{"type": PlutusScriptV2, "description": "", "cborHex": ...}'

When building transactions with Helios the UplcProgram instance is used directly when attaching scripts.