Help Storing Smart Contracts For Later Use

Question

I am a new blockchain developer and need some advice. I understand that when I deploy a smart contract on my private network I receive a transaction hash and an address of the smart contract. If I we're to interact with a smart contract from another node I understand that I need a copy of the smart contract ABI and the address of the smart contract on the network.

What is the proper way or suggestions to store these pieces of information so I can interact with that particular smart contract sometime in the future?

Answer 1

Check them into a Git repository and manage them like you would manage source code.

If you do the deployment with Truffle, it will create files under build/contracts containing the ABI and address, so you can just check those in and store them along with the source code to the contracts.

Alternatively just keep a record of the address you deployed from. The ABI information can be recreated from your source code, and the addresses of deployed contracts are on the blockchain.

If you want to share your contracts, you may also want to look at the following proposed package standard:

https://github.com/ethpm/ethpm-spec/blob/v1.0.0/README.md