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.

info

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

near-cli

# 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

near-cli-rs

# Automatically deploy the wasm in a new account
near account create-account sponsor-by-faucet-service <my-new-dev-account>.testnet autogenerate-new-keypair save-to-keychain network-config testnet create

near contract deploy <my-new-dev-account>.testnet use-file <route_to_wasm> without-init-call network-config testnet sign-with-keychain

Deploy in an Existing Account

near-cli

# login into your account
near login

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

near-cli-rs

# login into your account
near account import-account using-web-wallet network-config testnet

# deploy the contract
near contract deploy <accountId> use-file <route_to_wasm> without-init-call network-config testnet sign-with-keychain send

tip

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

info

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

Naming Convention for Public-Facing Methods

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.

near-cli

# Call the initialization method (`init` in our examples)
near call <contractId> <initMethod> [<args>] --accountId <accountId>

near-cli-rs

# Call the initialization method (`init` in our examples)
near contract call-function as-transaction <contractId> <initMethod> json-args [<args>] prepaid-gas '30 TeraGas' attached-deposit '0 NEAR' sign-as <accountId> network-config testnet sign-with-keychain send

info

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-cli

near view <contractId> <methodName>

near-cli-rs

near contract call-function as-read-only <contractId> <methodName> text-args '' network-config testnet now

tip

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-cli

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

near-cli-rs

near contract call-function as-transaction <AccountId> <MethodName> json-args <JsonArgs> prepaid-gas <PrepaidGas> attached-deposit <AttachedDeposit> sign-as <AccountId>  network-config testnet sign-with-keychain send