Plinth Template

Start a new Plinth smart contract project with one command:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/IntersectMBO/plinth-template/main/install.sh | sh

The installer asks which development environment you want, checks that the required tools are installed, explains what is needed (in particular the Cardano crypto C libraries), and creates a fresh project folder — named after your project (default: my-plinth-project) — containing just the files that environment needs:

Environment	What you need locally	Project contains
Nix	nix (crypto libs provided by the shell)	sources + nix files
Docker	docker or a browser (Codespaces)	sources + .devcontainer
Demeter	just a browser (hosted; nix inside)	sources + nix files
GHC + Cabal	ghcup with GHC 9.6/9.12, cabal, pkg-config	sources + get-crypto-libs.sh

Each project comes with a README covering just that setup, plus .gitignore, LICENSE.md and NOTICE.md (Nix and Demeter projects also carry the hlint/stylish-haskell configs the shell's pre-commit hooks point at). You can also skip the installer entirely: every project is a subset of the template/ directory, so copying it (plus get-crypto-libs.sh for the GHC+Cabal setup) works too.

Whatever you pick, the first thing to run inside the project (and its environment) is cabal build all, which compiles the example auction validator.

About the crypto C libraries

Plinth projects depend — via plutus-core and cardano-crypto-class — on three C libraries: libsodium (VRF-patched), libsecp256k1 and libblst. The Nix shell, the Docker image and Demeter workspaces provide them (via nix). GHC+Cabal projects instead download IOG's prebuilt, checksum- and commit-pinned binaries from iohk-nix releases into a per-user cache (~/.cache/plinth-crypto-libs), linked into the project at dist-newstyle/crypto-libs/ — nothing is installed system-wide; see get-crypto-libs.sh (--prefix installs them system-wide instead) and the GHC+Cabal README (template/readmes/ghc-cabal.md).

Repository layout — for maintainers

• template/ — the project files. The union of every environment's files; install.sh copies the relevant subset when creating a project (see create_project). One of template/readmes/ becomes the project's README.md.

• install.sh — the installer served over curl. --from DIR installs from a local checkout (offline/CI); passing every question's flag (--env ...) runs it non-interactively.

• get-crypto-libs.sh — the crypto-libs bootstrap, copied into GHC+Cabal projects next to their cabal.project.

• .github/ci/ — the test suite. Every GitHub workflow is a thin wrapper around one of these scripts, so everything can be run locally:

  .github/ci/run-all-local.sh                     # everything
  PLINTH_SKIP_HEAVY=1 .github/ci/run-all-local.sh # fast checks only
  PLINTH_RUN_PARITY=1 .github/ci/run-all-local.sh # + blueprint parity
  

  Script	Checks	Workflow
  lint.sh	shellcheck + syntax over all shell scripts	ci.yaml
  test-install.sh	install.sh end-to-end: exact per-env manifests,	ci.yaml
  	failure modes, real crypto download
  build-ghc-cabal.sh	full build of an installed GHC+Cabal project	ci.yaml
  build-nix.sh	full build of an installed Nix project (= Demeter)	ci.yaml
  build-docker.sh	full build inside the devx devcontainer image	ci.yaml
  bump-plutus-version.sh	bumps plutus + index-states in template/	bump-plutus-version.yml
  test-blueprint-parity.sh	blueprint byte-parity between ghcup and nix	blueprint-parity.yaml

  ci.yaml runs all of its jobs in parallel on every pull request — no path filters, everything is rebuilt and retested. The one exception is blueprint-parity.yaml: four full builds are too heavy per PR, so it runs weekly and on demand (gh workflow run or PLINTH_RUN_PARITY=1 .github/ci/run-all-local.sh). There is deliberately no native-Windows job: plutus-tx-plugin declares buildable: False on Windows, so Plinth projects only work there through WSL2 (covered by the Linux jobs).