daml/README.md

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Copyright 2019 Digital Asset (Switzerland) GmbH and/or its affiliates. All Rights Reserved.
SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0

# Welcome to the DAML repository!

This repository hosts all code for the [DAML smart contract language and SDK](https://daml.com/), originally created by
[Digital Asset](https://www.digitalasset.com). DAML is an open-source smart contract language for building future-proof distributed applications on a safe, privacy-aware runtime. The DAML SDK is a set of tools to help you develop applications based on DAML.

## Using DAML

To download DAML, follow [the installation instructions](https://docs.daml.com/getting-started/installation.html).
Once installed, to try it out, follow the [quickstart guide](https://docs.daml.com/getting-started/quickstart.html).

If you have questions about how to use DAML or how to build DAML-based solutions, please ask
them on [StackOverflow using the `daml` tag](https://stackoverflow.com/tags/daml).

## Contributing to DAML

We warmly welcome [contributions](./CONTRIBUTING.md). If you are looking for ideas on how to contribute, please browse our
[issues](https://github.com/digital-asset/daml/issues). To build and test DAML:

### 1. Clone this repository

```
git clone git@github.com:digital-asset/daml.git
cd daml
```

### 2. Set up the development dependencies

Our builds require various development dependencies (e.g. Java, Bazel, Python), provided by a tool called `dev-env`.

#### Linux and Mac

On Linux and Mac `dev-env` can be installed with:

1. Install Nix by running: `bash <(curl https://nixos.org/nix/install)`
2. Enter `dev-env` by running: `eval "$(dev-env/bin/dade assist)"`

If you don't want to enter `dev-env` manually each time using `eval "$(dev-env/bin/dade assist)"`,
you can also install [direnv](https://direnv.net). This repo already provides a `.envrc`
file, with an option to add more in a `.envrc.private` file.

#### Windows

On Windows you need to enable long file paths by running the following command in an admin powershell:

```
Set-ItemProperty -Path 'HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem' -Name LongPathsEnabled -Type DWord -Value 1
```

Then start `dev-env` from PowerShell with:

```
.\dev-env\windows\bin\dadew.ps1 install
.\dev-env\windows\bin\dadew.ps1 sync
.\dev-env\windows\bin\dadew.ps1 enable
```

In all new PowerShell processes started, you need to repeat the `enable` step.

### 3. First build and test

We have a single script to build most targets and run the tests. On Linux and Mac run `./build.sh`. On Windows run `.\build.ps1`. Note that these scripts may take over an hour the first time.

To just build do `bazel build //...`, and to just test do `bazel test //...`. To read more about Bazel and how to use it, see [the Bazel site](https://bazel.build).

On Mac if building is causing trouble complaining about missing nix packages, you can try first running `nix-build -A tools -A cached nix` repeatedly until it completes without error. 

### 4. Installing a local copy

On Linux and Mac run `daml-sdk-head` which installs a version of the SDK with version number `0.0.0`. Set the `version:` field in any DAML project to 0.0.0 and it will use the locally installed one.

On Windows:

```
bazel build //release:sdk-release-tarball
tar -vxf .\bazel-genfiles\release\sdk-release-tarball.tar.gz
cd sdk-*
daml\daml.exe install . --activate
```

That should tell you what to put in the path, something along the lines of `C:\Users\admin\AppData\Roaming\daml\bin`.
Note that the Windows build is not yet fully functional.

### Caching: build speed and disk space considerations

Bazel has a lot of nice properties, but they come at the cost of frequently rebuilding "the world".
To make that bearable, we make extensive use of caching. Most artifacts should be cached in our CDN,
which is configured in `.bazelrc` in this project.

However, even then, you may end up spending a lot of time (and bandwidth!) downloading artifacts from
the CDN. To alleviate that, by default, our build will create a subfolder `.bazel-cache` in this
project and keep an on-disk cache. **This can take about 10GB** at the time of writing.

To disable the disk cache, remove the following lines:

```
build:linux --disk_cache=.bazel-cache
build:darwin --disk_cache=.bazel-cache
```

from the `.bazelrc` file.

If you work with multiple copies of this repository, you can point all of them to the same disk cache
by overwriting these configs in either a `.bazelrc.local` file in each copy, or a `~/.bazelrc` file
in your home directory.


### Haskell profiling builds

To build Haskell executables with profiling enabled, pass `-c dbg` to
Bazel, e.g. `bazel build -c dbg damlc`. If you want to build the whole
SDK with profiling enabled use `daml-sdk-head --profiling`.