OK--If you've been reading this series straight through, take a breath.
We've run through a lot of the stack already, with everything that Truffle can do for you at the level of development and test environment, and tooling; we've taken you on a crash course through what MetaMask is, how you need to account for it as a developer, and how your users will experience it.
Now that we've got those two tools clearly explained, let's take a look at how they work beautifully in sync together, along with another tool we haven't discussed in depth yet, Infura: the Truffle Dashboard.
Truffle Dashboard: Stop copy + pasting your private keys
We briefly discussed, in Start Here, the relationship between EOAs and smart contracts. What we didn't mention is that generally, as a developer, you will be using an EOA to deploy your smart contract, and because of how developer workflows go, it's easy to have something bad happen, like publishing the SRP that has all the ETH you bought for testing and development to GitHub.
This has been an ongoing problem for some time, and it would be worth your while to familiarize yourself with our best practices from the bad old days, because they're still helpful.
But this is why Truffle made its Dashboard: so that instead of doing questionable things with .env and .gitignore files, you can manage your accounts with the convenience and safety of MetaMask:
Once you work with Truffle Dashboard, you're likely to realize that this is how it should have been all along.
- For an overview of how it works and how to use it, check out Truffle's blog post announcing it.
- If you're ready to jump into the docs, here they are.
- If you're looking for a Truffle Dashboard video tutorial, we've got two:
And with that, our orientation in dapp architecture, UX, and tooling is complete: it's time to get into the nitty-gritty.