AlgoKit contains advanced smart contract deployment capabilities that allow you to have idempotent (safely retryable) deployment of a named app, including deploy-time immutability and permanence control and TEAL template substitution. This allows you to control the smart contract development lifecycle of a single-instance app across multiple environments (e.g. LocalNet, TestNet, MainNet).
It's optional to use this functionality, since you can construct your own deployment logic using create / update / delete calls and your own mechanism to maintaining app metadata (like app IDs etc.), but this capability is an opinionated out-of-the-box solution that takes care of the heavy lifting for you.
App deployment is a higher-order use case capability provided by AlgoKit Utils that builds on top of the core capabilities, particularly App management.
To see some usage examples check out the automated tests.
The design behind the deployment capability is unique. The architecture design behind app deployment is articulated in an architecture decision record. While the implementation will naturally evolve over time and diverge from this record, the principles and design goals behind the design are comprehensively explained.
Namely, it described the concept of a smart contract development lifecycle:
- Development
- Write smart contracts
- Transpile smart contracts with development-time parameters (code configuration) to TEAL Templates
- Verify the TEAL Templates maintain output stability and any other static code quality checks
- Deployment
- Substitute deploy-time parameters into TEAL Templates to create final TEAL code
- Compile the TEAL to create byte code using algod
- Deploy the byte code to one or more Algorand networks (e.g. LocalNet, TestNet, MainNet) to create Deployed Application(s)
- Runtime
- Validate the deployed app via automated testing of the smart contracts to provide confidence in their correctness
- Call deployed smart contract with runtime parameters to utilise it
The App deployment capability provided by AlgoKit Utils helps implement #2 Deployment.
Furthermore, the implementation contains the following implementation characteristics per the original architecture design:
- Deploy-time parameters can be provided and substituted into a TEAL Template by convention (by replacing
TMPL_{KEY}
) - Contracts can be built by any smart contract framework that supports ARC-0032 and ARC-0004 (Beaker or otherwise), which also means the deployment language can be different to the development language e.g. you can deploy a Python smart contract with TypeScript for instance
- There is explicit control of the immutability (updatability / upgradeability) and permanence (deletability) of the smart contract, which can be varied per environment to allow for easier development and testing in non-MainNet environments (by replacing
TMPL_UPDATABLE
andTMPL_DELETABLE
at deploy-time by convention, if present) - Contracts are resolvable by a string "name" for a given creator to allow automated determination of whether that contract had been deployed previously or not, but can also be resolved by ID instead
This design allows you to have the same deployment code across environments without having to specify an ID for each environment. This makes it really easy to apply continuous delivery practices to your smart contract deployment and make the deployment process completely automated.
The AppDeployer
is a class that is used to manage app deployments and deployment metadata.
To get an instance of AppDeployer
you can use either AlgorandClient
via algorand.appDeployer
or instantiate it directly (passing in an AppManager
, AlgorandClientTransactionSender
and optionally an indexer client instance):
import { AppDeployer } from '@algorandfoundation/algokit-utils/types/app-deployer'
const appDeployer = new AppDeployer(appManager, transactionSender, indexer)
When AlgoKit performs a deployment of an app it creates metadata to describe that deployment and includes this metadata in an ARC-2 transaction note on any creation and update transactions.
The deployment metadata is defined in AppDeployMetadata
, which is an object with:
name: string
- The unique name identifier of the app within the creator accountversion: string
- The version of app that is / will be deployed; can be an arbitrary string, but we recommend using semverdeletable?: boolean
- Whether or not the app is deletable (true
) / permanent (false
) / unspecified (undefined
)updatable?: boolean
- Whether or not the app is updatable (true
) / immutable (false
) / unspecified (undefined
)
An example of the ARC-2 transaction note that is attached as an app creation / update transaction note to specify this metadata is:
ALGOKIT_DEPLOYER:j{name:"MyApp",version:"1.0",updatable:true,deletable:false}
In order to resolve what apps have been previously deployed and their metadata, AlgoKit provides a method that does a series of indexer lookups and returns a map of name to app metadata via algorand.appDeployer.getCreatorAppsByName(creatorAddress)
.
const appLookup = algorand.appDeployer.getCreatorAppsByName('CREATORADDRESS')
const app1Metadata = appLookup['app1']
This method caches the result of the lookup, since it's a reasonably heavyweight call (N+1 indexer calls for N deployed apps by the creator). If you want to skip the cache to get a fresh version then you can pass in a second parameter ignoreCache?: boolean
. This should only be needed if you are performing parallel deployments outside of the current AppDeployer
instance, since it will keep its cache updated based on its own deployments.
The return type of getCreatorAppsByName
is AppLookup
:
export interface AppLookup {
creator: Readonly<string>
apps: {
[name: string]: AppMetadata
}
}
The apps
property contains a lookup by app name that resolves to the current AppMetadata
value:
interface AppMetadata {
/** The id of the app */
appId: bigint
/** The Algorand address of the account associated with the app */
appAddress: string
/** The unique name identifier of the app within the creator account */
name: string
/** The version of app that is / will be deployed */
version: string
/** Whether or not the app is deletable / permanent / unspecified */
deletable?: boolean
/** Whether or not the app is updatable / immutable / unspecified */
updatable?: boolean
/** The round the app was created */
createdRound: bigint
/** The last round that the app was updated */
updatedRound: bigint
/** The metadata when the app was created */
createdMetadata: AppDeployMetadata
/** Whether or not the app is deleted */
deleted: boolean
}
An example AppLookup
might look like this:
{
"creator": "<creator_address>",
"apps": {
"<app_name>": {
/** The id of the app */
"appId": 1,
/** The Algorand address of the account associated with the app */
"appAddress": "<app_account_address>",
/** The unique name identifier of the app within the creator account */
"name": "<app_name>",
/** The version of app that is / will be deployed */
"version": "2.0.0",
/** Whether or not the app is deletable / permanent / unspecified */
"deletable": false,
/** Whether or not the app is updatable / immutable / unspecified */
"updatable": false,
/** The round the app was created */
"createdRound": 1,
/** The last round that the app was updated */
"updatedRound": 2,
/** Whether or not the app is deleted */
"deleted": false,
/** The metadata when the app was created */
"createdMetadata": {
/** The unique name identifier of the app within the creator account */
"name": "<app_name>",
/** The version of app that is / will be deployed */
"version": "1.0.0",
/** Whether or not the app is deletable / permanent / unspecified */
"deletable": true,
/** Whether or not the app is updatable / immutable / unspecified */
"updatable": true
}
}
//...
}
}
In order to perform a deployment, AlgoKit provides the algorand.appDeployer.deploy(deployment)
method.
For example:
const deploymentResult = algorand.appDeployer.deploy({
metadata: {
name: 'MyApp',
version: '1.0.0',
deletable: false,
updatable: false,
},
createParams: {
sender: 'CREATORADDRESS',
approvalProgram: approvalTealTemplateOrByteCode,
clearStateProgram: clearStateTealTemplateOrByteCode,
schema: {
globalInts: 1,
globalByteSlices: 2,
localInts: 3,
localByteSlices: 4,
},
// Other parameters if a create call is made...
},
updateParams: {
sender: 'SENDERADDRESS',
// Other parameters if an update call is made...
},
deleteParams: {
sender: 'SENDERADDRESS',
// Other parameters if a delete call is made...
},
deployTimeParams: {
// Key => value of any TEAL template variables to replace before compilation
VALUE: 1,
},
// How to handle a schema break
onSchemaBreak: OnSchemaBreak.Append,
// How to handle a contract code update
onUpdate: OnUpdate.Update,
// Optional execution control parameters
populateAppCallResources: true,
})
This method performs an idempotent (safely retryable) deployment. It will detect if the app already exists and if it doesn't it will create it. If the app does already exist then it will:
- Detect if the app has been updated (i.e. the program logic has changed) and either fail, perform an update, deploy a new version or perform a replacement (delete old app and create new app) based on the deployment configuration.
- Detect if the app has a breaking schema change (i.e. more global or local storage is needed than were originally requested) and either fail, deploy a new version or perform a replacement (delete old app and create new app) based on the deployment configuration.
It will automatically add metadata to the transaction note of the create or update transactions that indicates the name, version, updatability and deletability of the contract. This metadata works in concert with appDeployer.getCreatorAppsByName
to allow the app to be reliably retrieved against that creator in it's currently deployed state. It will automatically update it's lookup cache so subsequent calls to getCreatorAppsByName
or deploy
will use the latest metadata without needing to call indexer again.
deploy
also automatically executes template substitution including deploy-time control of permanence and immutability if the requisite template parameters are specified in the provided TEAL template.
The first parameter deployment
is an AppDeployParams
, which is an object with:
metadata: AppDeployMetadata
- determines the deployment metadata of the deploymentcreateParams: AppCreateParams | AppCreateMethodCall
- the parameters for an app creation call (raw or ABI method call)updateParams: Omit<AppUpdateParams | AppUpdateMethodCall, 'appId' | 'approvalProgram' | 'clearStateProgram'>
- the parameters for an app update call (raw or ABI method call) without theappId
,approvalProgram
orclearStateProgram
, since these are calculated by thedeploy
methoddeleteParams: Omit<AppDeleteParams | AppDeleteMethodCall, 'appId'>
- the parameters for an app delete call (raw or ABI method call) without theappId
, since this is calculated by thedeploy
methoddeployTimeParams?: TealTemplateParams
- allows automatic substitution of deploy-time TEAL template variablesTealTemplateParams
is akey => value
object that will result inTMPL_{key}
being replaced withvalue
(where a string orUint8Array
will be appropriately encoded as bytes within the TEAL code)
onSchemaBreak?: 'replace' | 'fail' | 'append' | OnSchemaBreak
- determines what should happen if a breaking change to the schema is detected (e.g. if you need more global or local state that was previously requested when the contract was originally created)onUpdate?: 'update' | 'replace' | 'fail' | 'append' | OnUpdate
- determines what should happen if an update to the smart contract is detected (e.g. the TEAL code has changed since last deployment)existingDeployments?: AppLookup
- optionally allows the app lookup retrieval to be skipped if it's already been retrieved outside of thisAppDeployer
instanceignoreCache?: boolean
- optionally allows the lookup cache to be ignored and force retrieval of fresh deployment metadata from indexer- Everything from
SendParams
- transaction execution control parameters
deploy
is idempotent which means you can safely call it again multiple times and it will only apply any changes it detects. If you call it again straight after calling it then it will do nothing.
When compiling TEAL template code, the capabilities described in the above design are present, namely the ability to supply deploy-time parameters and the ability to control immutability and permanence of the smart contract at deploy-time.
In order for a smart contract to opt-in to use this functionality, it must have a TEAL Template that contains the following:
TMPL_{key}
- Which can be replaced with a number or a string / byte array which wil be automatically hexadecimal encoded (for any number of{key}
=>{value}
pairs)TMPL_UPDATABLE
- Which will be replaced with a1
if an app should be updatable and0
if it shouldn't (immutable)TMPL_DELETABLE
- Which will be replaced with a1
if an app should be deletable and0
if it shouldn't (permanent)
If you are building a smart contract using the production AlgoKit init templates provide a reference implementation out of the box for the deploy-time immutability and permanence control.
If you passed in a TEAL template for the approvalProgram or clearStateProgram (i.e. a string
rather than a Uint8Array
) then deploy
will return the compilation result of substituting then compiling the TEAL template(s) in the following properties of the return value:
compiledApproval?: CompiledTeal
compiledClear?: CompiledTeal
Template substitution is done by executing algorand.app.compileTealTemplate(tealTemplateCode, templateParams?, deploymentMetadata?)
, which in turn calls the following in order and returns the compilation result per above (all of which can also be invoked directly):
AppManager.stripTealComments(tealCode)
- Strips out any TEAL comments to reduce the payload that is sent to algod and reduce the likelihood of hitting the max payload limitAppManager.replaceTealTemplateParams(tealTemplateCode, templateParams)
- Replaces thetemplateParams
by looking forTMPL_{key}
AppManager.replaceTealTemplateDeployTimeControlParams(tealTemplateCode, deploymentMetadata)
- IfdeploymentMetadata
is provided, it allows for deploy-time immutability and permanence control by replacingTMPL_UPDATABLE
withdeploymentMetadata.updatable
if it's notundefined
and replacingTMPL_DELETABLE
withdeploymentMetadata.deletable
if it's notundefined
algorand.app.compileTeal(tealCode)
- Sends the final TEAL to algod for compilation and returns the result including the source map and caches the compilation result within theAppManager
instance
When deploy
executes it will return a comprehensive result object that describes exactly what it did and has comprehensive metadata to describe the end result of the deployed app.
The deploy
call itself may do one of the following (which you can determine by looking at the operationPerformed
field on the return value from the function):
create
- The smart contract app was createdupdate
- The smart contract app was updatedreplace
- The smart contract app was deleted and created again (in an atomic transaction)nothing
- Nothing was done since it was detected the existing smart contract app deployment was up to date
As well as the operationPerformed
parameter and the optional compilation result, the return value will have the AppMetadata
fields present.
Based on the value of operationPerformed
there will be other data available in the return value:
- If
create
,update
orreplace
then it will have the relevantSendAppTransactionResult
values - If
replace
then it will also have{deleteReturn?: ABIReturn, deleteResult: ConfirmedTransactionResult}
to capture the result of the deletion of the existing app