This post is going to talk about the installation of Hyperledger’s tool called Hyperledger Composer which is used to create business networks and enables business analysts and developers to create smart contracts and blockchain applications.
Before we jump into the installation of the composer tool, I would like to give you clarity on the choice of the platform that best fits for the development.
Platform Support
Windows
If you own a Windows machine then I would recommend that you install a virtual machine like VirtualBox/ VMWare and then spin an Ubuntu image in it. Since the fabric heavily relies on the Unix environment and docker it is suggested that we use a Linux variant for installing the fabric. Native Windows support is not there yet for Hyperledger Fabric as of (April 2019)
MacOS
If you own a Mac OS then it is not going to be a problem as the environment itself is based on Unix. The only aspect that you have to ensure is sufficient disk space
Ubuntu
If you are on Ubuntu then it is a cake-walk for you who enjoys the perks of being a Linux user.
Cloud Infrastructure
Cloud platform comes to the rescue irrespective of what operating system you run. It is so handy that you can just ‘ssh’ to the instance that you have created in the cloud. There are many providers viz. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and so on. You can refer to this page for detailed support by cloud providers for Ubuntu. I am not going to guide you through in choosing the cloud provider nor in creating an instance but I can show you a sample on AWS as a reference.
Kindly visit the link to check the AWS marketplace for subscribing to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS — Bionic image.
Choose the T2-medium tier as the option while choosing the image.
T2 medium is required as the Fabric needs at least 4GB of memory. Kindly note that charges for t2.medium may vary from other models. Please ensure that you check the cost per hour before spinning as the running EC2-instance may incur charges. You can refer to the EC2 documentation here.
It is important to note that in the sequence of subscribing to the t2.medium ec2 instance you will be landed on a specific page where you will be asked to define the security group for the instance to communicate with the outside world. By default, SSH will be open, adding to this you need to open up all the TCP ports for your IP (NOTE: It is a risk to open TCP ports to all IPs and be specific on which IP you are going to use). Kindly ensure that you refer the documentation/experts in order to define the security group settings.
Now that we are done with the choice of platform, in the following series we can start installing the pre-requisites.