Installing the site builder
This section describes the steps necessary to setup the Walrus Sites' site-builder tool and
prepare your environment for development.
Prerequisites
Before you start, make sure you
- have a recent version of Rust installed;
- followed all Walrus setup instructions.
Then, follow these additional setup steps.
Installation
Similar to the walrus client CLI tool, we currently provide the site-builder client binary for
macOS (Intel and Apple CPUs), Ubuntu, and Windows:
| OS | CPU | Architecture |
|---|---|---|
| Ubuntu | Intel 64bit | ubuntu-x86_64 |
| Ubuntu | Intel 64bit (generic) | ubuntu-x86_64-generic |
| MacOS | Apple Silicon | macos-arm64 |
| MacOS | Intel 64bit | macos-x86_64 |
| Windows | Intel 64bit | windows-x86_64.exe |
We now offer a pre-built binary also for Windows. However, most of the remaining instructions assume a UNIX-based system for the directory structure, commands, etc. If you use Windows, you may need to adapt most of those.
You can download the latest build from our Google Cloud Storage (GCS) bucket (correctly setting the
$SYSTEM variable):
SYSTEM= # set this to your system: ubuntu-x86_64, ubuntu-x86_64-generic, macos-x86_64, macos-arm64, windows-x86_64.exe
curl https://storage.googleapis.com/mysten-walrus-binaries/site-builder-testnet-latest-$SYSTEM -o site-builder
chmod +x site-builder
To be able to run it simply as site-builder, move the binary to any directory included in your
$PATH environment variable. Standard locations are /usr/local/bin/, $HOME/bin/, or
$HOME/.local/bin/.
The site builder will look for the default configuration file sites-config.yaml in the current
directory, the $XDG_HOME/walrus/sites-config.yaml and $HOME/walrus/sites-config.yaml directory.
In case you want to use explicitly a different sites-config.yaml, use the --config flag to
specify the path to the configuration file.
Once this is done, you should be able to simply type site-builder in your terminal.
$ site-builder
Usage: site-builder [OPTIONS] <COMMAND>
Commands:
publish Publish a new site on Sui
update Update an existing site
convert Convert an object ID in hex format to the equivalent Base36
format
sitemap Show the pages composing the Walrus site at the given object ID
help Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)
⋮
Configuration
The site-builder tool needs a configuration file to work. This file is called sites-config.yaml
and looks like this:
# module: site
# portal: walrus.site
package: 0xdf9033cac39b7a9b9f76fb6896c9fc5283ba730d6976a2b1d85ad1e6036c3272
# general:
# rpc_url: https://fullnode.testnet.sui.io:443
# wallet: /path/to/.sui/sui_config/client.yaml
# walrus_binary: /path/to/walrus
# walrus_config: /path/to/devnet_deployment/client_config.yaml
# gas_budget: 500000000
As you can see, the configuration file is quite simple. The only mandatory field is the package
field, which represents the Sui object ID of the Walrus Sites smart contract. You can find the
latest version of the package in the Walrus Sites
repository on the testnet branch.
The stable branch of Walrus Sites is testnet.
Make sure that you always pull the latest changes from there.
You can define the location of the sites-config.yaml file using the --config flag when running
the site-builder commands like so:
site-builder --config /path/to/sites-config.yaml publish <build-directory-of-a-site>
However, if are not a fan of repeating the same flags over and over, it's always easier to have the configuration file in one of the default locations.
Download the sites-config.yaml file from the repository, and place it in one of the aforementioned
default locations. To illustrate, we will use the ~/.config/walrus directory, like so:
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MystenLabs/walrus-sites/refs/heads/testnet/sites-config.yaml -o ~/.config/walrus/sites-config.yaml
You are now ready to start working on your Walrus Sites! 🎉