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NEAR CLI - Basics

After your contract is ready you can deploy it in the NEAR network for everyone to use it.

Let us guide you on how to use the NEAR CLI to deploy your contract and call its methods.

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On this page, we will only cover the basics of NEAR CLI. For more information visit the NEAR CLI documentation page.

Deploying the Contract​

Thanks to the NEAR CLI deploying a contract is as simple as:

  1. Compiling the contract to wasm (done automatically through yarn build in our templates).
  2. Create an account and deploy the contract into it using NEAR CLI.

Create an Account and Deploy​

# Create a new account pre-funded by a faucet & deploy
near create-account <accountId> --useFaucet
near deploy <accountId> <route_to_wasm>

# Get the account name
cat ./neardev/dev-account

Deploy in an Existing Account​

# login into your account
near login

# deploy the contract
near deploy <accountId> <route_to_wasm>
tip

You can overwrite a contract by deploying another on top of it. In this case, the account's logic will change, but the state will persist

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By default near-cli uses the testnet network. Define NEAR_ENV=mainnet to deploy into mainnet.

Naming Convention for Public-Facing Methods

Once the contract is deployed to the network, anyone and any other contract (i.e., any other account on NEAR) can interact with it by calling its methods. Furthermore, any transactions involving the contract will also be included in the network's data stream, which means its activity can also be visible to any who listens to particular events.

Considering this, we advise to name methods using snake_case in all SDKs as this is compatible with the remainder of the NEAR ecosystem which is predominantly comprised of Rust contracts.

Initializing the Contract​

If your contract has an initialization method you can call it to initialize the state. This is not necessary if your contract implements default values for the state.

# Call the initialization method (`init` in our examples)
near call <contractId> <initMethod> [<args>] --accountId <accountId>
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You can initialize your contract during deployment using the --initFunction & --initArgs arguments.

Calling the Contract​

Once your contract is deployed you can interact with it right away using NEAR CLI.

View methods​

View methods are those that perform read-only operations. Calling these methods is free, and do not require to specify which account is being used to make the call:

near view <contractId> <methodName>
tip

View methods have by default 200 TGAS for execution

Change methods​

Change methods are those that perform both read and write operations. For these methods we do need to specify the account being used to make the call, since that account will expend GAS in the call.

near call <contractId> <methodName> <jsonArgs> --accountId <yourAccount> [--deposit <amount>] [--gas <GAS>]
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