2 - Remix IDE

What is Remix?

Remix is an open-source, web and desktop IDE for Ethereum development. It is the easiest development tool to get started with building on Ethereum, and has a huge collection of plugins to extend its experience. Remix helps you write Solidity code directly in the browser, and has tools for testing, debugging, and deploying your smart contract to the blockchain. You can use Remix online at https://remix.ethereum.org/ or offline by downloading Remix Desktop

Go through the documentation at Remix IDE Docs.

When you first open Remix, you will be greeted with a screen like this.

In the left sidebar, you can switch between the File Explorer, the Solidity Compiler, the Deployer, and an Extensions panel. In the bottom, there is an output panel, which displays output from your compilation, your deployments, and your function calls. In the middle is where you will edit code. Currently it displays the home screen of the IDE, but once we open a file it will become the code editor.

How to test your projects?

For the next projects, you will be provided with a user interface to test your Smart Contract. You can start by using Remix to test calls and transactions however to check the compliance of the contract to a required interface we propose to use a simple UI implementation to interact with the contract. This interface requires Metamask. In particular, Smart Contract must be deployed on the testnet defined by Metamask.

link

Note that unit test could have been provided to test the contract but that is another lesson.

Conclusion

In this lesson, we have learn how to use Remix to compile and deploy a sample Smart Contract. In the next lesson, we see how to code a Smart Contract using Solidity.