Using Solang on the command line

The Solang compiler is run on the command line. The solidity source file names are provided as command line arguments; the output is an optimized wasm or bpf file which is ready for deployment on a chain, and an metadata file (also known as the abi).

The following targets are supported right now: Solana, Parity Substrate, and Ethereum ewasm.

Usage

Usage:

solang [OPTIONS]… [SOLIDITY SOURCE FILE]…

This means that the command line is solang followed by any options described below, followed by one or more solidity source filenames.

Options:

-v, \-\-verbose

Make the output more verbose. The compiler tell you what contracts have been found in the source, and what files are generated. Without this option Solang will be silent if there are no errors or warnings.

\-\-target target

This takes one argument, which can either be solana, substrate, or ewasm. The target must be specified.

\-\-address\-length length-in-bytes

Change the default address length on Substrate. By default, Substate uses an address type of 32 bytes. This option is ignored for any other target.

\-\-value\-length length-in-bytes

Change the default value length on Substrate. By default, Substate uses an value type of 16 bytes. This option is ignored for any other target.

\-\-doc

Generate documentation for the given Solidity files as a single html page. This uses the doccomment tags. The result is saved in soldoc.html. See Tags for further information.

-o, \-\-output directory

This option takes one argument, which is the directory where output should be saved. The default is the current directory.

-O optimization level

This takes one argument, which can either be none, less, default, or aggressive. These correspond to llvm optimization levels.

\-\-importpath directory

When resolving import directives, search this directory. By default import will only search the current directory. This option can be specified multiple times and the directories will be searched in the order specified.

\-\-importmap map=directory

When resolving import directives, if the first part of the path matches map, search the directory provided for the file. This option can be specified multiple times with different values for map.

\-\-help, -h

This displays a short description of all the options

\-\-standard-json

This option causes Solang to emulate the behaviour of Solidity standard json output. No output files are written, all the output will be in json on stdout.

This feature is used by Hyperledger Burrow’s deploy tool.

\-\-emit phase

This option is can be used for debugging Solang itself. This is used to output early phases of compilation.

Phase:

ast-dot: Output Abstract Syntax Tree as a graphviz dot file. This can be viewed with xdot or any other tool that can visualize graphviz dot files.
cfg: Output control flow graph.
llvm-ir: Output llvm IR as text.
llvm-bc: Output llvm bitcode as binary file.
asm: Output assembly text file.
object: Output wasm object file; this is the contract before final linking.

\-\-no\-constant\-folding

Disable the Constant Folding Pass codegen optimization

\-\-no\-strength\-reduce

Disable the Strength Reduction Pass codegen optimization

\-\-no\-dead\-storage

Disable the Dead Storage pass optimization

\-\-no\-vector\-to\-slice

Disable the Vector to Slice Pass optimization

\-\-no\-cse

Disable the Common Subexpression Elimination optimization

Running Solang using container

First pull the last Solang container from solang containers:

docker pull ghcr.io/hyperledger-labs/solang

And if you are using podman:

podman image pull ghcr.io/hyperledger-labs/solang

Now you can run Solang like so:

docker run --rm -it ghcr.io/hyperledger-labs/solang --version

Or podman:

podman container run --rm -it ghcr.io/hyperledger-labs/solang --version

If you want to compile some solidity files, the source file needs to be available inside the container. You can do this via the -v command line. In this example /local/path should be replaced with the absolute path to your solidity files:

docker run --rm -it -v /local/path:/sources ghcr.io/hyperledger-labs/solang -o /sources /sources/flipper.sol

On Windows, you need to specify absolute paths:

docker run --rm -it -v C:\Users\User:/sources ghcr.io/hyperledger-labs/solang -o /sources /sources/flipper.sol