Local installation of plutus and plutus playground

I’ve followed the excellent introductory lecture here: Plutus Pioneer Program - Iteration #2 - Lecture #1 - YouTube, and now I’m trying to follow the instructions and set up Plutus playground locally. I am running a windows machine but working inside a docker environment that inherits from the Nix image at dockerhub (nixos/nix - I’m completely new to Nix but have lots of Docker experience).

What I have done:

  • I also followed the cache instructions, adding the two lines underneath to my /etc/nix/nix.conf file before building the nix shell

  • I pulled down the two repos required in the example and checked out the correct version, but when I run the nix-shell command it builds for a very long time (currently ~90 minutes and counting)

  • I think the cache commands are working correctly, because I see lots of ‘https://hydra.iohk.io’ in the source addresses (eg. see image below) but I can’t be sure that this is the case… is this just a very slow step?

If anyone else has tips for how to set this up robustly and quickly (I suppose I’ll need to do this a few times in the future as the source code is changing constantly) I’d be really eager to hear!

Thanks,
Jack

– UPDATE –

It did finish running some time later, and I was able to continue with the instructions. But remaining steps continue to be slow for me (are they highly resource intensive?).

How do I break out a single nix-shell session into multiple windows? I’m using tmux inside the nix-shell for now, but it’s unclear if it’s working or not (the npm start command is now running very slowly), I think it is blocked (after ~5 minutes, I see Awaiting for locks or build slots..., cannot add image due to new user restrictions on 1 image per post)

I continued to struggle with the self-building method, when I ran upon this wonderful guide: https://docs.plutus-community.com/docs/setup/DockerCompose.html

The repo in the post provides a Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml for self-building (which was pretty close to mine from before but handles nix better), but it also has links to pre-build images that will run for you.

I downloaded the first one, it was 3GB and took a little while to download and extract and run, but I’m pleased to say I’ve at last got the playground running locally! I haven’t yet experimented with it beyond opening it in localhost but I’m pretty confident that this route will work for me at last.