An interactive alternative CLI for the flow blockchain
Aether is a CLI that reimagines how it is to develop using the flow blockchain. It is made after having 5 years of experience on developing on flow. I really wish I had aether when i particpated in OpenWorldBuilders back in 2020.
Since I have this experience and know how flow works i decided to help the community out with making a tool that suits my needs and also user needs. So if you have something you need show me a message. I am pretty friendly.
Aether allows the developer with 1 command to do what you almost always want to do when you want to develop on flow:
- it starts the emulator with sane defaults
- it creates the users you have defined in the deployment block on the emulator and give them some funds
- it deploys all contracts on emulator
- it starts the fcl dev wallet, and adds the users to dev-wallet so you can just use them
- it then optionally runs a list of init transactions so you can just start coding.
- aggregates all logs in a pane so you can see it and filter in it.
- starts your frontend for you if you want to
This was the start of Aether, then i added support for a mini indexer. It will read all the blocks and transactions and aggregate them in a nice table view so you can observe them.
I needed a way to run transactions so i added a pane where you can choose and run transactions.
I wanted to follow mainnet or testnet so i addes support for that.
I wanted to save a transaction on testnet/mainnet locally so i can run them with different premutations so that was implemented.
Aether started in january because i wanted to make it easier to start all the required things to do development on flow as a single command. During forte hacks I took this to the next level where i used windsurf to code out a fully fledged TUI using bubbletea, and interactive toolkit for making terminal applications in golang. I have reiterated and reimplemented alot in aether as the commit history show. While doing Aether I also made some other things that might be interesting to the flow community like a chroma syntax highlighter for cadence. vibe coded a very simple next-js started example for aether in the example folder
Aether has not raied any funds or received any grants thus far.