Welcome to the Holochain developer portal. Holochain is a tool for creating and running distributed applications. This site is for people who have a general understanding of what Holochain is, and what to use it for, and would like to know how to build a Holochain application. For more of an overview of Holochain, see the website, overview, and FAQ.
For in-person learning events, see the list of upcoming hackathons on the website.
To ask questions and join the developer community, join the HC App Dev channel in our Mattermost chat.
The Holochain library is written in the programming language Go, but Holochain apps are written in the programming languages JavaScript and Lisp. Holochain utilizes command line tools for building and running applications. When you "install Holochain" you are installing the core Holochain library, along with the command lines tools. Installing Holochain is the first step towards building Holochain applications. Once it's installed, you can develop or run as many Holochain apps as you like.
To develop Holochain applications you need to know about:
- getting Holochain installed
- how to use the command line tools
- how to configure your application with a "DNA" file
- how to write your application code in JavaScript or Lisp
- how to think through building a distributed application
- how to build a user interface for your app
- how to test your application code
In order to get a feel for how a Holochain app is developed from start to finish, each section of these docs will include a portion where we show a step in developing a sample application, the "Hello World" of Holochain, HoloWorld. There is a repository on github to view the finished version, but following along in the docs will allow you to recreate this, and learn the basics! Look for the "HoloWorld Tutorial" sections. If you want to skip straight to it, the tutorial starts here.
This site is here to provide all you need to develop Holochain apps, if you find something missing, please give us feedback! The first thing to getting going is Installing Holochain...