Supporting tools and getting help

Learn Cardano

The Cardano Developer Portal has a hands-on onboarding path for new developers. Its lectures start with wallets, keys, and transactions, and continue to writing, testing, and using validators. Its Get started page creates a project with cardano-init, and a tutorial builds a complete atomic swap dApp: validator, off-chain code, and frontend.

Supporting tools

Each language has supporting tools: editor extensions (VS Code, Neovim, Zed, Emacs, JetBrains), language servers, and online playgrounds.

• cardano-init doctor lists the ones that match the stack in your project, under Supporting tools (deps[].support in JSON).
• cardano-init list shows them for every tool, on a Tooling line (tools[].support in JSON).

The links are stored in the support field of registry/deps.toml, and come from each tool’s own documentation.

Some tools are useful with any stack:

• CBOR and transaction inspectors, to decode datums, redeemers, and raw transactions;
• block explorers for mainnet, preprod, and preview;
• the testnet faucet, for free test ADA.

The Builder Tools page on the Developer Portal lists them.

Getting help

Every tool in the registry records its official community channels, usually a Discord server, sometimes GitHub Discussions or a forum. They are the channels that each project links from its own website or repository.

• cardano-init doctor shows them for the components in your project, under Get help.
• cardano-init list shows them for every tool (tools[].community in JSON).

For questions about Cardano in general, the Cardano Developer Portal links to the developer Discord, the Cardano Forum, and Cardano Stack Exchange.