zkVM Quick Start
Welcome to the zkVM Quick Start page! Here are the steps between you and your first proof:
- Install the RISC Zero toolchain.
- Initialize a new project using the cargo risczero tool.
- Edit the boilerplate to build your first project.
- Run your project locally or with Bonsai.
1. Install the RISC Zero Toolchain
If you have already installed Rust via rustup, you can install our toolchain by running
cargo install cargo-binstall
cargo binstall cargo-risczero
cargo risczero install
If you need to install Rust or encounter problems, take a look at our full installation instructions.
2. Initialize a New Project
Once you've installed the toolchain, you can initialize a new project using the starter template by running:
cargo risczero new my_project
See the cargo risczero docs for other options for initialization.
3. Edit the boilerplate to build your first project
In the codebase for your new project, you'll find a handful of places marked TODO, where you'll need to make some changes in order to build your first project.
Don't worry -- each TODO comes with instructions for what you need to do, and the Hello World tutorial contains step-by-step instructions.
4. Quick Development: Leveraging Dev Mode
During the development of your project, you might find that running your code can take a long time due to the proof generation process. To address this issue and allow for faster iterations of your code, we suggest utilizing dev-mode. This mode bypasses the time-consuming proof generation process. To activate dev-mode, simply set the environment variable RISC0_DEV_MODE=true when executing your project (other acceptable values include 1 and yes).
Example:
RISC0_DEV_MODE=true cargo run --release
For a deeper understanding of dev-mode and its safe usage, please refer to our page explaining what is dev-mode. Please note that dev-mode is only meant to be used during development and testing. It should never be used in production.
5. Real Proof Generation
Once you've reached a point where you're ready to generate real proofs, you can do so by unseting the RISC0_DEV_MODE environment variable (or setting it to RISC0_DEV_MODE=false). We recommend that you additionally specify the feature flag disable-dev-mode, which will ensure that dev-mode is not accidentally enabled. Please consult more information about disable-dev-mode in the feature flags table, and the dev-mode page for more information.
Proceeding with the example above, generating proofs locally would be achieved by running:
RISC0_DEV_MODE=false cargo run --release --features disable-dev-mode
Note that RISC0_DEV_MODE=false is the default behavior, so you can also simply run:
cargo run --release --features disable-dev-mode
We would always recommend using disable-dev-mode in production, as it ensures that dev-mode is not accidentally enabled.
Also, note that since now proofs are being generated, the execution time of your project will be significantly longer than when running in dev-mode. You might want to consider using Bonsai to generate proofs remotely, as it will likely be faster than running proofs locally.
6. Local & Remote Proving
You can build and run your zkVM applications using your own hardware, or you can upload your guest program to Bonsai and make requests for proof generation as needed.
Local Proving
To run the zkVM on your own machine, we recommend at least 16GB of RAM.
The readme files on the zkVM demo applications show cargo commands for local proof generation.
Remote Proving
To run the zkVM remotely using Bonsai, request access and set the environment variables BONSAI_API_KEY=<YOUR_API_KEY> and BONSAI_API_URL=<BONSAI_URL>.
Additional information is available in the starter template
Other options
Options such as GPU acceleration and skipping the proof generation are documented in the feature flags.
Congratulations!
That's all it takes to build and run a minimal RISC Zero application.