How to deploy a smart contract on a private blockchain?

Question

I have used geth to setup a local private blockchain. I have been able to setup two accounts and send ether from one to the other and mine the transactions. Now I am trying to deploy a smart contract. I followed this steps:

Used solcjs to generate the .abi and .bin files

Start the miner

Unlocked the account used to deploy the contract

Saved in the geth console the bin and abi with:

var contract = web3.eth.contract(<CONTENTS_OF_ABI_FILE>)
var bytecode = '0x<CONTENTS_OF_BIN_FILE>'

Deploy the smart contract with:

var deploy = {from:eth.accounts[0], data:bytecode, gas: 2000000}
var instance = contract.new(param1,param2,param3, deploy)

Then geth returns undefined and if I execute `instance.address' I still get undefined.

Why is my contract not getting mined?

Answer 1

new will not return the address immediately. What you'll have immediatelly is transaction hash. From there on, you'll have to wait for the transaction to be mined.

From https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/JavaScript-API :

// Deploy contract syncronous: The address will be added as soon as the contract is mined.
// Additionally you can watch the transaction by using the "transactionHash" property
var myContractInstance = MyContract.new(param1, param2, {data: myContractCode, gas: 300000, from: mySenderAddress});
myContractInstance.transactionHash // The hash of the transaction, which created the contract
myContractInstance.address // undefined at start, but will be auto-filled later

I would suggest to use a framework like truffle. In truffle a transaction will be a promise and you can await the completion.