Quick Start Guide

Introduction

Corda 5 is the next generation of R3's digital ledger technology.

We currently (as of 2022-04-26) do not ship or make publicly available all the object code (jar files, class files, etc). As a result, if you want to write your own CorDapp using Corda 5, you must download and build from source.

Corda 5 repositories

The code that implements Corda 5 and manages the building and deployment processes of a Corda 5 cluster is split across these repositories:

• corda/corda-runtime-os
• corda/corda-api
• corda/corda-cli-plugin-host
• corda/corda-dev-helm (required for deployment)

Automated checkout script (optional)

The following script is provided for convenience but you may also manually check out the projects if preferred.

#!/bin/bash

mkdir corda
cd ./corda
git clone https://github.com/corda/corda-runtime-os.git 
git clone https://github.com/corda/corda-api.git 
git clone https://github.com/corda/corda-cli-plugin-host.git 
git clone https://github.com/corda/corda-dev-helm.git # Required for deployment

Note: To build the code successfully all cloned repositories should be immediate children of the same parent directory. In Corda 5 we have adopted Gradle's composite build to simplify the overall building process for the end user. The composite build is a centralized build process where a Gradle task is triggered from one project and includes the other required builds (known as included builds).

See the Building Corda 5 section for more details.

Requirements

Hardware

Most of the computers that we use to develop, build, and test Corda 5 have:

• Gen 9 Intel (6 cores / 12 threads) CPUs
• 32GiB RAM
• At least 30GiB disk.

These are not minimum specifications. This what is known to work with the code as of 2022-04-26, which is still under development.

Software

Operating Systems

Corda 5 should run on and be developed on:

• MacOS
• Linux
• Windows 10/11

Other Software

• Java (Azul Zulu JDK 17) (Note: other versions should work but have not been extensively tested.)
• Intellij ~v2023.2.2 community edition or IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate Edition
• git v2.39.3 or later
• docker-engine ~v20.X.Y or docker-desktop v4.25.1 (or later)
• Kubernetes (incl. kubectl)
• Helm

Building Corda 5

To build, clone each repository in the same parent directory:

• corda/corda-runtime-os
• corda/corda-api
• corda/corda-cli-plugin-host

As the projects have been configured to use composite build, you only have to run a single build task from the corda-runtime-os project. The composite build is based on the following:

• The boolean property CompositeBuild in the gradle.properties file in the root directory of the corda-runtime-os project. You must update this to true as it is set to false by default.
• The project/folder naming (as above). If for some reason the projects are named differently, the project name references can be updated in the same gradle.properties file. For example:

# Enables the substitution of binaries for source code if it exists in expected location
# Default behavior is false.
compositeBuild=false
cordaApiLocation=../corda-api
cordaCliHostLocation=../corda-cli-plugin-host

If you are intending to deploy using minikube, configure your shell to use the Docker daemon inside minikube so that built images are available directly to the cluster:

Bash:

eval $(minikube docker-env)

PowerShell:

minikube docker-env --shell=powershell | Invoke-Expression

From the <parent-dir>/corda-runtime-os directory run the following command:

./gradlew publishOSGiImage

Deploying a local Corda 5 cluster

For information about deploying a local cluster, see Local development with Kubernetes This section includes information about running end-to-end tests.