Solana On A M1 Mac

I started the buildspace Solana project this week. I planned to be done with it but ran into some bumps along the way. This was going to be a MUCH longer post but thanks to the collective effort of the TAs and community at large. Once again, this community amazes me with the willingness to help others!

Enough story time. As of today, the best/easiest way to get Solana development running on an M1 Mac.

Installing Solana

To use the arm version of Solana, we are going to build it from scratch

Hit up The Solana Docs and follow the build from source first step.

DO NOT run solana-install init we are going to do something different.

DO put the unzipped file in a reasonable location, you are going to need to keep that directory around for a while.

Once we have the build completed, we need to go into the sdk directory

cd sdk/cargo-build-bpf
cargo install --path .

This will install the cargo-build-bpf program to ~/.cargo/bin

Next we need to create a link to the SDK folder for cargo as well. $PROJECT_ROOT should be the location of the current Solana directory.

ln -s $PROJECT_ROOT/bin/sdk ~/.cargo/bin/sdk

Once we have Solana ready to go, we should doublecheck

solana --version

If you don’t have homebrew installed, take a moment to do that. Also install coreutils (This will solve the greadlink: command not found issue if you run into that)

brew install coreutils

Setup Solana for running locally

solana config set --url localhost

At this point, we should be able to run

solana-test-validator --no-bpf-jit

And see something like

❯ ~ solana-test-validator --no-bpf-jit

Ledger location: test-ledger
Log: test-ledger/validator.log
Identity: 6cfpMfGtsAqunxFkw2uS6ksxbc3Wu2HkTnYuZaouTVZk
Genesis Hash: SkHaD52opQhEhB2E34LgZBCLn54uE7a4WwFfXGNGMtf
Version: 1.8.2
Shred Version: 2336
Gossip Address: 127.0.0.1:1024
TPU Address: 127.0.0.1:1027
JSON RPC URL: http://127.0.0.1:8899
⠐ 00:00:05 | Processed Slot: 9 | Confirmed Slot: 9 | Finalized Slot: 0 | Snapsho
❯ ~

Node and Mocha

If you don’t have node installed, you can do

brew install node

Which will get it up and running, and then we need to install the Mocha test framework

npm install -g mocha

Anchor, the Hardhat of Solana

Next we need to install Anchor, we are almost there!

cargo install --git https://github.com/project-serum/anchor anchor-cli --locked

At this point, we should be able to run

anchor --version

Anchor needs a few npm packages

npm install @project-serum/anchor @solana/web3.js

If yarn isn’t installed, you will need it too

brew install yarn

Setup A Project

Anchor can create a scaffold for a project for you

anchor init myproject --javascript
cd myproject

The current issue with Anchor on M1 is that the test validator it runs won’t work. You might see this error when you run anchor test

FetchError: request to http://localhost:8899/ failed

To side step this, you need to run the following command in a separate window.

solana-test-validator --no-bpf-jit

Additionally, we need to get the address from Solana. If you haven’t, generate a new key pair.

solana-keygen new -o target/deploy/myproject-keypair.json

Then get the key address and store it in Anchor.toml in the project root

solana address -k target/deploy/myproject-keypair.json

At this point, we should be good to run

anchor test --skip-local-validator

You should see 1 passing test!

HUZZAH, we’ve jumped through all the hoops and can develop locally on our spiffy M1 Mac!