DAOStack Alchemy - Creating DAOs for an Emergent Future

What is Alchemy?

DAOStack Alchemy is a browser application that enables anyone with an account on the Ethereum blockchain, and STK tokens to spend, to easily create and work with DAOs on Ethereum that run on predefined, configurable smart contracts in a network of organizations, collaborators and investors that collaborate on the blockchain.

Implementation

The application uses the standards-compliant and highly modular browser-side framework Aurelia (hence "Aurelia" in the name of the repository).

Browser-side the application uses TypeScript/ECMAScript 2016+.

At this time there are no web server-side components.

DaoStack-Arc-Js

Alchemy uses a library of reusable and configurable Ethereum smart contracts called "DaoStack-Arc-Js". You can see all of the source code for those contracts and even contribute to the project here.

See It Live

You can browse to the latest release at http://daostack.azurewebsites.net. This deployment of Alchemy assumes you are either running a Kovan chain locally (listening on localhost:8485), or you are using Chrome and have an extension such as MetaMask that enables you to connect to a Kovan node.

Building The Code

To build the code, follow these steps.

1. Ensure that NodeJS is installed.
2. From the project folder, install the packages:

  npm install

3. build the application:

  npm start webpack.build.production

4. start the application:

  npm start serve

Defining Which Chain to Run Against

The ETH_ENV environment variable, defined in the developer's OS environment or on the build command line, specifies which blockchain network should be used by the application.

The variable is only used when building the app bundle. The webpack config file obtains the value at build time and pokes it into the app bundle where it is used at runtime.

When deploying to production, we avoid grabbing the wrong chain from the dev environment by hard-coding the desired chain into the NPM command that builds the production version of the app bundle.

Miscellaneous Notes

• You will find the compiled and bundled javascript in the dist folder.

• We use Webpack for bundling the javascript, html, css and images.

• We use dependency injection where-ever possible, including in the Typescript (client-side).

• Hot Module Reload (HMR) works when built for Development. Build and serve up HMR:

    npm start webpack.build.development.serve