Deploying contracts in Ropsten with Truffle

Question

I have another n00b question... sorry about that :(

I'm trying to deploy a smart contract to Ropsten. I have synched the Ropsten network with geth --testnet --fast --rpc --rpcapi eth,net,web3,personal, and it looks perfectly up to date.

Then I try to deploy that smart contract (which I've already deployed to my private testrpc network and it works poerfectly) to Ropsten. To do so I'm executing truffle migrate --network ropsten and I'm getting this pesky error:

Could not connect to your Ethereum client. Please check that your Ethereum client:
    - is running
    - is accepting RPC connections (i.e., "--rpc" option is used in geth)
    - is accessible over the network
    - is properly configured in your Truffle configuration file (truffle.js)

The geth instance is in fact up and running, since I can connect to it with geth attach http://127.0.0.1:8545 and it works fine. It is accepting connections, since I used the --rpc option. It is accessible over the network because I've already accessed it... and I think than my Truffle configuration file is ok, here's how it looks:

require('babel-register')

module.exports = {
  networks: {
    development: {
      host: 'localhost',
      port: 8545,
      network_id: '*' // Match any network id
    },
    ropsten: {
      host: "localhost",
      port: 8545,
      network_id: "3",
    }
  }
}

Can anyone please tell me why am I getting this error and what can I do to fix it?

Thank you so much in advance!!! :)

Answer 1

When I was deploying my contract through truffle in rinkeby network I too got the same error after adding from address and gas it got deployed. Try this

networks: {
  ropsten: {
    network_id: 3,
    host: '127.0.0.1',
    port: 8545,
    gas: 4000000,
    from: <your unlocked ropsten account address>
  },

Answer 2

It's hard to get your ropsten account unlocked. You might opt for private key deployment. I've build lib for something like this.

const etherlime = require('etherlime');

const ICOTokenContract = require('./build/contracts/ICOToken.json');

const randomAddress = '0xda8a06f1c910cab18ad187be1faa2b8606c2ec86';

const defaultConfigs = {
    gasPrice: 20000000000,
    gasLimit: 4700000
}

const deployer = new etherlime.InfuraPrivateKeyDeployer('Your Privste KEY', 'ropsten', 'Your infura API key', defaultConfigs);

const runICODeployment = async () => {
    const contractWrapper = await deployer.deploy(ICOTokenContract);
    const transferTransaction = await contractWrapper.contract.transferOwnership(randomAddress);
    const result = await contractWrapper.verboseWaitForTransaction(transferTransaction.hash, 'Transfer Ownership');
}
runICODeployment()

Place this in a simple js file and run it with node. Hope this helps.