# First Time Setup

Before starting the Plutus Pioneer Program or developing on the Plutus platform in general, you'll need to do some one-time setup.

These instructions are for Arch Linux. You'll need around 26GB of free hard disk space and around 8GB of RAM. More is better, to be safe.

Install Nix. Nix is a tool for reproducible builds and deployment.

sh <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install) --daemon

Follow any prompts during installation.

Open the Nix configuration as root

sudo vim /etc/nix/nix.conf

Add the following lines

substituters = https://hydra.iohk.io https://iohk.cachix.org https://cache.nixos.org/
trusted-public-keys = hydra.iohk.io:f/Ea+s+dFdN+3Y/G+FDgSq+a5NEWhJGzdjvKNGv0/EQ= iohk.cachix.org-1:DpRUyj7h7V830dp/i6Nti+NEO2/nhblbov/8MW7Rqoo= cache.nixos.org-1:6NCHdD59X431o0gWypbMrAURkbJ16ZPMQFGspcDShjY=
experimental-features = nix-command

The first two lines tell Nix to use the binary cache maintained by IOHK when building their code. It can save hours of build time.

The last line tells Nix to enable the nix command, as it is an experimental feature that is disabled by default.

Save and close the file

:wq

I don't think that Ubuntu machines have this problem, but on my Arch machine, the Nix service had trouble starting

Getting the Nix daemon status...

systemctl status nix-daemon

Showed that it was loaded but inactive. The error message indicated that it couldn't find the daemon-socket directory it was expecting.

If you have the same problem I did, make the daemon-socket directory manually

sudo mkdir -p /nix/var/nix/daemon-socket

Then start the Nix daemon

sudo systemctl enable --now nix-daemon

Reload active sessions and restart the Nix service. The easiest way to do this for me was to reboot the machine

sudo shutdown -r now

You'll need git installed for the next step. Install it if you don't already have it.

Clone the Plutus Pioneer Program repository to your local machine.

git clone https://github.com/input-output-hk/plutus-pioneer-program

Clone the Plutus Apps repository. This will create a new directory called plutus-apps under your current working directory.

git clone https://github.com/input-output-hk/plutus-apps

Change into the plutus-apps directory

cd plutus-apps

Start a Nix Shell

nix-shell

Starting the Nix Shell puts you in a reproducible environment defined by IOHK. In order to do this, it needs to have all the tools and packages defined by the Nix configuration. The first time you run this, it will take a around 20-30 minutes to download and build the environment. Make sure you see it downloading files from hydra.iohk.io. If you don't, that means the binary cache was not set up correctly. Go back and make sure you follow all the previous steps correctly.

Now your development environment is set up and you're ready to procede with the program. It is important to run this command inside the plutus-apps directory every time you want to work with the Plutus Application Framework.