Dapple is a Solidity developer multitool designed to manage the growing complexity of interconnected smart contract systems.

Its core functionality encompasses three main areas:

• Package management
• Contract building
• Deployment scripting

These concepts are related in a way unique to the smart contract ecosystem, due to each blockchain's universal singleton nature.

The central data model for Dapple is the dappfile, whose definition will normally reference IPFS objects and Ethereum contract addresses.

The normal way to install Dapple is through npm:

$ npm install -g dapple
$ dapple --help

You can read about detailed system specific installation on the documentation.

Use dapple init to generate a project skeleton:

mkdir foo;
cd foo;
dapple init

By default, build/ is where the output of dapple build gets put, and contracts/ is where Dapple looks for your contract source files. Both of these are configured in your dappfile and can be overridden.

Now try writing a contract and a test (see Dapple test harness docs):

$ vim contracts/dapp.sol
$ vim contracts/dapp_test.sol
$ dapple test

Finally, try building your project:

$ dapple build

By default, dapple build builds the entire contracts/ tree, and emits the following:

• cached build objects
• classes.json — a list of type definitions
• js_module.js — a JavaScript module which wraps classes.json and adds Contract objects instantiated from web3.js for each object in the dappfile

• Dappsys — a contract system framework (Nexus's "standard library")
• Feedbase — a simple paid feed app
• stringutils — string manipulation library
• RanDAOPlus - Experimental Ethereum RNG based on PoW

• tests
• packages
• Deployment scripting
• Logging
• dapplerc
• troubleshoot/ FAQ

• Aliasing and imports
• Environments and object linking
• Ignore/add