Project setup

If you're looking to find out what it takes to build a Polywrap Wasm wrapper, you've come to the right place! This guide will help you understand Polywrap's core concepts. If you haven't checked out our Start Here section yet, we recommend visiting that section first.

In this guide, we'll download a simple but complete project to help us get started. We'll look at the different folders and files that make up a Polywrap wrapper, such as the GraphQL schema and WebAssembly implementations. Then, we'll dive in and add more code to these existing files to expand the functionality of our wrapper. Finally, we'll learn about the different ways you can build and deploy your wrapper so that other devs can integrate your wrapper into their own apps!

tip

This guide will make use of a simple smart contract written in Solidity. We'll be adding a few functions to it and then use a script to deploy the contract to a test environment where we'll interact with it using our Polywrap wrapper.

NB: No Solidity or smart contract knowledge is required to use the guide!

If you want to skip ahead to see the resulting code of this guide, visit our Demos repository.

If at any time in this process you get stuck or have questions, please reach out to us on Discord.

Prerequisites

You'll need the following installed before building your wrapper:

• nvm
• yarn
• docker
• docker-compose

You'll be using AssemblyScript to implement your wrapper's logic. AssemblyScript compiles to WebAssembly.

tip

For now, AssemblyScript and Rust are the only languages with which you can implement your wrapper. In the future, we will support additional languages that compile to WebAssembly, such as Go.

If you have experience programming in TypeScript, you'll feel at home with AssemblyScript since the language's syntax is very similar.

👋 This guide is meant for those who want to build and deploy their own wrappers. If you're interested in integrating deployed wrappers into your own app, see our Integrate into a JS App guide.

Create your project

Let's begin by downloading the Polywrap demos repository, which contains the SimpleStorage Wasm wrapper we will be using in this guide:

git clone https://github.com/polywrap/demos.git

From the root of this new directory, navigate to simple-storage/wrapper/assemblyscript.

tip

The best way to start a new wrapper project is with a project template generated using our CLI.

npx polywrap create wasm assemblyscript <project-name>

Where <project-name> is replaced with a custom name of your choice. For example my-wrapper.

After running this command, you'll see a new folder appear with the custom name you've chosen. The folder will contain everything you need to get started!

Installation

Let's ensure all of your project's dependencies are installed. From inside the project's directory, simply run:

• nvm install && nvm use
• yarn

The Polywrap CLI is now installed locally to your project's directory. Going forward we'll use this local installation by running npx polywrap.

We recommend not installing the polywrap package globally to avoid future version conflicts, and maximize reproducibility for the other developers you're working with.

Let's head over to the next section to see what's in this new directory!