If you encounter an issue while following this tutorial, see Troubleshooting.

​
Introduction

Welcome to the first installment of the Deploy your first contract guide! 🥇 As a popular phrase (often attributed to Abraham Lincoln) says, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. The first installment of the series will therefore guide you through setting up your development environment, which will include the three most recommended tools to begin developing on Starknet:
  • Scarb, a build toolchain and package manager for Cairo and Starknet ecosystems
  • Starknet Foundry, the go-to framework for building and testing Starknet Smart Contracts
  • Starknet Devnet, a Rust implementation of a local Starknet node
To review all Starknet developer tools, see Developer tools.

​
Setting up your environment on MacOS and Linux

On MacOS and Linux, Scarb, Starknet Foundry and Starknet Devnet can be easily installed using the Starkup installer by running: 
   curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.starkup.sh | sh
and following the onscreen instructions.
If you prefer to install the tools manually or encounter issues with Starkup, see Setting up your environment manually on MacOS and Linux.
You can verify that all three tools are installed correctly by running: 
   scarb --version
   snforge --version && sncast --version
   starknet-devnet --version
If the installation was successful, the result should resemble the following: 
scarb 2.11.4 (c0ef5ec6a 2025-04-09)
cairo: 2.11.4 (https://crates.io/crates/cairo-lang-compiler/2.11.4)
sierra: 1.7.0

snforge 0.48.1
sncast 0.48.1

starknet-devnet 0.4.3
Starkup installs Scarb, Starknet Foundry, and Starknet Devnet on MacOS and Linux via the asdf version manager, which allows to easily switch between their different versions, both globally and per project (see full details in the asdf documentation or by running asdf --help). Alongside Scarb and Starknet Foundry, Starkup uses asdf to install additional useful tools, including the Universal Sierra Compiler, Cairo Profiler, Cairo Coverage, and CairoLS.If you encounter any issues while using it or have any requests, please help by submitting an issue.

​
Setting up your environment on Windows

Setting up Scarb and Starknet Foundry on Windows requires configuring the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and installing the tools inside a Linux distribution such as Ubuntu.

​
Installing WSL and Ubuntu

  1. Open PowerShell as administrator and run: 
    wsl --install
    This command installs WSL along with the default Ubuntu distribution. If WSL or virtualization is not yet enabled, reboot and re-run the command as needed.
  2. Restart your computer when prompted.
  3. After reboot, launch Ubuntu from the Start menu. On the first launch, create a UNIX username and password when prompted.
If wsl --install does not work, enable WSL manually by running:
dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux /all /norestart
dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:VirtualMachinePlatform /all /norestart
and installing Ubuntu from the Microsoft Store.

​
Installing prerequisites in Ubuntu

  1. Open the Ubuntu terminal and run: 
    sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y curl git build-essential

​
Installing Homebrew

  1. Run the Homebrew install script: 
    /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
  2. Add Homebrew to your shell environment: 
    echo 'eval "$(/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin/brew shellenv)"' >> ~/.profile
source ~/.profile
  3. Verify that Homebrew was installed correctly: 
    brew --version

​
Installing asdf

Using asdf allows you to easily switch between versions of Scarb, Starknet Foundry, and Starknet Devnet globally or per project.
  1. Install asdf using Homebrew: 
    brew install asdf
  2. Add asdf to your shell: 
    echo '. "$(brew --prefix asdf)/libexec/asdf.sh"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc
  3. Verify that asdf is installed correctly: 
    asdf --version

​
Installing Scarb, Starknet Foundry, and Starknet Devnet

  1. Add the Scarb plugin and install the latest Scarb version: 
    asdf plugin add scarb
asdf install scarb latest
asdf set -u scarb latest
  2. Add the Starknet Foundry plugin and install the latest Starknet Foundry version: 
    asdf plugin add starknet-foundry
asdf install starknet-foundry latest
asdf set -u starknet-foundry latest
  3. Add the Starknet Devnet plugin and install the latest Starknet Devnet version: 
    asdf plugin add starknet-devnet
asdf install starknet-devnet latest
asdf set -u starknet-devnet latest
  4. Restart your terminal and verify that Scarb, Starknet Foundry, and Starknet Devnet were installed correctly: 
    scarb --version
snforge --version && sncast --version
starknet-devnet --version
    If scarb, snforge, or starknet-devnet are not recognized, try running source ~/.bashrc or restarting your terminal.