Create Aptos Dapp Custom Indexer Template

The custom indexer template provides a starter dapp with all the necessary infrastructure to build a full stack app with custom indexer support.

You can preview the template at: https://aptos-full-stack-demo.vercel.app/

The Custom Indexer template provides:

Folder structure - A pre-made dapp folder structure with src for frontend, contract for Move contract and indexer for custom indexer.
Dapp infrastructure - All required dependencies a dapp needs to start building on the Aptos network.
Wallet Info implementation - Pre-made WalletInfo components to demonstrate how one can use to read a connected Wallet info.
Message board functionality - Pre-made MessageBoard component to create, update and read messages from the Move smart contract.
Analytics dashboard - A pre-made Analytics component to show the number of messages created and updated.
Point program - A minimal example to show you how to define a point program based on events (e.g. create message, update message) and show that on the analytics dashboard, with sorting.

Generate the custom indexer template

On your terminal, navigate to the directory you want to work in and run:

npx create-aptos-dapp@latest

Follow the CLI prompts.

Getting started

Publish the contract

Run the below command to publish the contract on-chain:

npm run move:publish

This command will:

Publish the contract to the chain.
Set the MODULE_ADDRESS in the .env file to set the contract object address.

Create a postgres database

Sign up for Neon postgres which is our cloud Postgres provider and create a new project. Find the connection string in Neon console’s quickstart section, it should look like postgresql://username:password@host/neondb?sslmode=require and set it in the .env file as DATABASE_URL.

Setup the database

💡

Everything here should be run in the indexer folder.

Install Rust.

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Install diesel cli to run migrations.

cargo install diesel_cli --no-default-features --features postgres

Run all pending database migrations. This will create all the tables in the database.

diesel migration run \
    --config-file="src/db_migrations/diesel.toml" \
    --database-url="postgresql://username:password@neon_host/db_name?sslmode=require"

In case you want to revert all migrations to delete all tables because you want to re-index all data.

diesel migration revert \
	--all \
	--config-file="src/db_migrations/diesel.toml" \
    --database-url="postgresql://username:password@neon_host/db_name?sslmode=require"

In case you want to make any change to the database, you can add a new migration.

diesel migration generate create-abc-table \
    --config-file="src/db_migrations/diesel.toml"

Run the custom indexer locally

In the indexer folder, make a copy of example.config.yaml and rename it to config.yaml. Fill in the following:

starting_version: The tx version (Aptos concept, similar to block height) from which you want to start indexing
postgres_connection_string: The connection string of the postgres database, DO NOT include the ?sslmode=require because diesel doesn’t recognize it correctly, instead we handle it in the code
contract_address: The address of the Move contract
auth_token: Aptos Build API token

Start the custom indexer locally:

cargo run --release -- -c config.yaml

Run the frontend

npm run dev

Building the frontend

The template utilizes React with Next.js for the frontend, and it is styled with Tailwind CSS and shadcn/ui. All dapp components should be added into the components folder and it is recommended to create a app folder to hold all future pages in your project.

Writing a Move contract

The template comes with a contract folder that holds all Move smart contract related files. Under the sources folder you will find a *.move file with a super basic implementation of a Move module that stores a message and updates it. This is to help you get started with writing your own Smart Contract.

Smart contract and frontend communication

For a frontend to submit a transaction to a smart contract, it needs to call an entry function. The boilerplate provides you with an entry-functions folder to hold all your dapp entry function requests. Additionaly, for a frontend to fetch data, it reads the data from the databse. You can find the database queries in the src/db folder.

Ready for Mainnet

If you started your dapp on testnet, and you are happy with your testing, you will want to get the dapp on mainnet.

To publish the smart contract on mainnet, we need to change some configuration.

Open the .env file and make the below changes:

Note: Make sure you have created an existing account on Aptos mainnet

Create a new database or a new branch on Neon Postgres for production and update the DATABASE_URL in the .env file in your frontend.
Change the APP_NETWORK value to mainnet.
Update the MODULE_PUBLISHER_ACCOUNT_ADDRESS to be the existing account address.
Update the MODULE_PUBLISHER_PRIVATE_KEY to be the existing account private key.
Run npm run move:publish to publish your move module on Aptos mainnet.

Deploy frontend to a live server

create-aptos-dapp provides an npm command to easily deploy the static site to Vercel.

At the root of the folder, simply run:

Terminal

npm run deploy

Then, follow the prompts. Please refer to Vercel docs to learn more about the Vercel CLI

If you are looking for different services to deploy the static site to, create-aptos-dapp utilizes Vite as the development tool, so you can follow the Vite deployment guide. In a nutshell, you would need to:

Run npm run build to build a static site
Run npm run preview to see how your dapp would look like on a live server
Next, all you need is to deploy your static site to a live server, there are some options for you to choose from and can follow this guide on how to use each

Deploy indexer to a live server

We recommend using Google Cloud Run to host the indexer, Secret Manager to store config.yaml and Artifact Registry to store the indexer docker image.

Build the docker image locally and run the container locally

Build the docker image targeting linux/amd64 as we will eventually push the image to Artifact Registry and deploy it to Cloud Run, which only supports linux/amd64.

docker build --platform linux/amd64 -t indexer .

You can run the docker container locally to make sure it works. Mac supports linux/amd64 emulation so you can run the x86 docker image on Mac.

docker run -p 8080:8080 -it indexer

Push the locally build docker image to Artifact Registry

gcloud auth login

Create a repo in the container registry and push to it. You can learn more about publishing to Artifact Registry on their docs.

Authorize docker to push to Artifact Registry. Set the default region below to your region.

# update us-west2 to your region, you can find it in google cloud
gcloud auth configure-docker us-west2-docker.pkg.dev

Tag the docker image.

# update us-west2 to your region, you can find it in google cloud
docker tag indexer us-west2-docker.pkg.dev/google-cloud-project-id/repo-name/indexer

Push to the Artifact Registry.

# update us-west2 to your region, you can find it in google cloud
docker push us-west2-docker.pkg.dev/google-cloud-project-id/repo-name/indexer

Upload the config.yaml file to Secret Manager

Go to secret manager and create a new secret using the config.yaml file. Please watch this video walkthrough carefully: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bbwe617fqM31swqc9W5ck8G8eyg3H4H2/view

Run the container on Cloud Run

Please watch this video walkthrough carefully and follow the exact same setup: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JayWuH2qgnqOgzVuZm9MwKT42hj4z0JN/view.

Go to the Cloud Run dashboard, create a new service, then select the container image from Artifact Registry. Make sure to add a volume to load the config.yaml file from Secret Manager, then mount the volume to the container.

You can learn more about Cloud Run in their docs.

NOTE: Always allocate CPU so it always runs instead of only run when there is traffic. Min and max instances should be 1.

Re-indexing

WARNING: Do not ever try to backfill the data, as logic like point calculation is incremental. If you backfill (e.g. processing same event twice), you will get wrong point data. So please always revert all migrations and re-index from the first tx your contract deployed.

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