Sugar

working on this section

Sugar was introduced by Metaplex to make operating the candy machine an easier process. It also introduced the use of a cache file that contains information about a collection that can now be stored onchain. It also increase the overall speed of the process from uploading to the mint.

The first step is to install it.

For MacOs and Linux:

bash <(curl -sSf https://sugar.metaplex.com/install.sh)

For Windows download the installer. Open it and try to look at the version you have in your terminal with the following:

sugar --version

And to view the available commands:

sugar -h
//Result
sugar-cli 0.6.1
Command line tool for creating and managing Metaplex Candy Machines.

USAGE:
    sugar [OPTIONS] <SUBCOMMAND>

OPTIONS:
    -h, --help                     Print help information
    -l, --log-level <LOG_LEVEL>    Log level: trace, debug, info, warn, error, off
    -V, --version                  Print version information

SUBCOMMANDS:
    bundlr           Interact with the bundlr network
    collection       Manage the collection on the candy machine
    create-config    Interactive process to create the config file
    deploy           Deploy cache items into candy machine config on-chain
    hash             Generate hash of cache file for hidden settings
    help             Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)
    launch           Create a candy machine deployment from assets
    mint             Mint one NFT from candy machine
    reveal           Reveal the NFTs from a hidden settings candy machine
    show             Show the on-chain config of an existing candy machine
    sign             Sign one or all NFTs from candy machine
    update           Update the candy machine config on-chain
    upload           Upload assets to storage and creates the cache config
    validate         Validate JSON metadata files
    verify           Verify uploaded data
    withdraw         Withdraw funds from candy machine account closing it

To begin using Sugar, we will want to to prepare the assets that we will upload to decentralized storage and later mint.

Asset Preparation

Preparing your assets can be done with some tools that are available on Github or can be created manually for smaller collections. The first repository we'll be looking at was originally made by Hashlips, but for this test we can use a fork which has been edited to fit the current token metdata standard.

We will begin by cloning the repository:

git clone https:https://github.com/HectorNBL/SOL-NFT-Generator-HNB.git

Open the folder in your IDE of choice. For this step, we'll use VSCode. You should see the following folders:

In the main folder, you should see a Layers folder and you can proceed to place your layers' folders in here. The rarity of the layers in this generator is set by adding a # after a layer's name with a number.

Layer Name Example: Green#20.png

Then, we'll go to the src folder which contains a config.js and a main.js file. You'll set the content of the jsons files for your collection within the config.js file. In this same file you will set the number of assets you want to generate.

growEditionSizeTo: 5,

In this example, we are generating 5 assets which inlcudes both image and json files for the metdata.

After changing all necessary information in the config.js file, you can proceed to open a terminal and change the directory to the generator folder. We will now install yarn:

yarn install

We can then generate our files:

node index.js
//Result
Created edition: 1
Created edition: 2
Created edition: 3
Created edition: 4
Created edition: 5

The assets are then found in the Build folder.

Collection Preparation

Finally, if you are creating a collection you will require an additional NFT which will be set as the collection NFT. To do this you can add an extra image and json file that will be uploaded with the rest of your assets. The names for these are the following:

colleciton.png
collection.json

Sugar Usage

Many of the fields for a collection are now set onchain, and to do this sugar will take in a config file. You can find an example of this file here in the Metaplex Docs.

You might have noticed from the subcommands listed above that Sugar also has the option of generating a config file using the following command in your terminal

sugar create-config

After doing this you will have to answer a set of questions and your answers will be stored in your config file.

This image shows the answers we chose for this test. The next step is to upload your assets, these include both your images and json files:

sugar upload <ASSETS DIRECTORY> -c <CONFIG FILE>

Once the upload was succeful we can proceed to deploy sugar.

sugar deploy

If you are working with a collection you'll want to set the collection at this point.

sugar collection set <COLLECTION NFT MINT　ID＞

The last step is to mint our NFTs. Sugar also allows you to directly mint to your wallet with:

sugar mint