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What You’ll Achieve

By the end of this quickstart, you’ll be able to:
  • Set up your development environment to deploy on Algen
  • Deploy your smart contracts to Algen L2
  • Connect your frontend to your smart contracts

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Set Up Your Development Environment

  1. Create a new project directory
mkdir my-algen-project && cd my-algen-project
  1. Install Foundry, a powerful framework for smart contract development
curl -L <https://foundry.paradigm.xyz> | bash
foundryup
This installs Foundry and updates it to the latest version.
  1. Initialize a new Solidity project
forge init
Your Foundry project is now ready. You’ll find an example contract in the src directory, which you can replace with your own contracts. For the purposes of this guide, we’ll use the Counter contract provided in /src/Counter.sol

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Configure Foundry with Algen

To deploy your smart contracts to Algen, you need two key components:
  1. A node connection to interact with the Algen network
  2. A funded private key to deploy the contract
Let’s set up both of these:

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1. Set up your node connection

  1. Create a .env file in your project’s root directory
  2. Add the Algen network RPC URL to your .env file
ALGEN_L2_RPC_URL="<https://rpc.alg2.algen.network>"
ALGEN_L2_TEST_RPC_URL="<https://rpc.alg2-test.algen.network>"
  1. Load your environment variables
source .env

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2. Secure your private key

  1. Store your private key in Foundry’s secure keystore
cast wallet import deployer --interactive
  1. When prompted enter your private key and a password.
Your private key is stored in ~/.foundry/keystores which is not tracked by git.

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Deploy Your Contracts

Now that your environment is set up, let’s deploy your contracts to Algen L2 Testnet.
  1. (Optional) First, perform a dry run to simulate the deployment and verify everything is configured correctly:
forge create ./src/Counter.sol:Counter --rpc-url $ALGEN_L2_TEST_RPC_URL --account deployer
This performs a simulation without broadcasting the transaction to the network. You’ll see the transaction details and contract ABI, but no actual deployment will occur.
  1. Deploy your contract by adding the --broadcast flag:
forge create ./src/Counter.sol:Counter --rpc-url $ALGEN_L2_TEST_RPC_URL --account deployer --broadcast
Note the format of the contract being deployed is <contract-path>:<contract-name>.
  1. After successful deployment, you’ll see output including:
Deployer: 0x... Deployed to: 0x... <-- YOUR CONTRACT ADDRESS Transaction hash: 0x...
  1. Copy the deployed contract address and add it to your .env file:
COUNTER_CONTRACT_ADDRESS="0x..."
Replace 0x... with your actual deployed contract address from the output above.
  1. Load the new environment variable:
source .env

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Verify Your Deployment

To ensure your contract was deployed successfully:
  1. Check the transaction on Algen L2 Test Scan using your transaction hash
  2. Use the cast command to interact with your deployed contract from the command line:
cast call $COUNTER_CONTRACT_ADDRESS "number()(uint256)" --rpc-url $ALGEN_L2_TEST_RPC_URL
This will return the initial value of the Counter contract’s number storage variable, which will be 0. Congratulations! You’ve deployed your smart contracts to Algen L2 Testnet!