Deploying to DAML Ledgers

To run a DAML application, you’ll need to deploy it to a DAML ledger.

How to Deploy

You can deploy to:

  • The Sandbox with persistence. For information on how to do this, see the section on persistence in DAML Sandbox docs.
  • Other available DAML ledgers. For information on these options and their stage of development, see the tables below.

To deploy a DAML project to a ledger, you will need the ledger’s hostname (or IP) and the port number for the gRPC Ledger API. The default port number is 6865. Then, inside your DAML project folder, run the following command, taking care to substitute the ledger’s hostname and port for <HOSTNAME> and <PORT>:

Once you have retrieved your access token, you can provide it by storing it in a file and provide the path to it using the --access-token-file command line option.

$ daml deploy --host=<HOSTNAME> --port=<PORT> --access-token-file=<TOKEN-FILE>

This command will deploy your project to the ledger. This has two steps:

  1. It will allocate the parties specified in the project’s daml.yaml on the ledger if they are missing. The command looks through the list of parties known to the ledger, sees if any party is missing by comparing display names, and adds any missing party via the party management service of the Ledger API.
  2. It will upload the project’s compiled DAR file to the ledger via the package management service of the Ledger API. This will make the templates defined in the current project available to the users of the ledger.

Instead of passing --host and --port flags to the command above, you can add the following section to the project’s daml.yaml file:

If the ledger has no authenication, the --access-token-file flag may be ommitted.

ledger:
    host: <HOSTNAME>
    port: <PORT>

You can also use the daml ledger command for more fine-grained deployment options, and to interact with the ledger more generally. Try running daml ledger --help to get a list of available ledger commands:

$ daml ledger --help
Usage: daml ledger COMMAND
  Interact with a remote DAML ledger. You can specify the ledger in daml.yaml
  with the ledger.host and ledger.port options, or you can pass the --host and
  --port flags to each command below. If the ledger is authenticated, you should
  pass the name of the file containing the token using the --access-token-file
  flag.

Available options:
  -h,--help                Show this help text

Available commands:
  list-parties             List parties known to ledger
  allocate-parties         Allocate parties on ledger
  upload-dar               Upload DAR file to ledger
  navigator                Launch Navigator on ledger

Available DAML Products

The following table lists commercially supported DAML ledgers and environments that are available for production use today.

Product Ledger Vendor
Sextant for DAML Amazon Aurora Blockchain Technology Partners
Sextant for DAML Hyperledger Sawtooth Blockchain Technology Partners
project : DABL Managed cloud enviroment Digital Asset

Open Source Integrations

The following table lists open source DAML integrations.

Ledger Developer More Information
Hyperledger Sawtooth Blockchain Technology Partners Github Repo
Hyperledger Fabric Hacera Github Repo
PostgreSQL Digital Asset DAML Sandbox Docs

DAML Ledgers in Development

The following table lists the ledgers that are implementing support for running DAML.

Ledger Developer More Information
VMware Blockchain VMware Press release, April 2019
Corda R3 press release, June 2019
QLDB Blockchain Technology Partners press release, September 2019
Canton Digital Asset reference implementation canton.io