Getting Started With EOS — Interact with your first EOS account on mainnet and testnet

Overview & Incentive

Ever since I published the tutorial series “Beginner’s guide to blockchain/Ethereum” in 2017, it has been so rewarding to me in a wide variety of aspects. Also, as I have received more and more client requests for EOS projects in my own blockchain consulting startup, TuringChain, I have thus decided to start writing tutorials again for beginners in EOS.

I’m using mac. If you encounter any problem, please kindly let me know in the comments so I can update it accordingly :)

Hope that you will like it, happy hacking!

Start coding!

Before we start exploring EOS, there are a few things we will need. You can skip the main blockchain part first because it is not fully free.

For the main EOS blockchain(optional):

1. Install an EOS wallet mobile app of your choice: I’m using Meet.one
2. Create an EOS account: Following the instructions in the app, you may need to pay a small registration fee because storage in EOS is not free. Your account needs storage to be created and stored on EOS.
3. Install an EOS Wallet Chrome Extension called Scatter: You can see Scatter as the MetaMask in Ethereum.

For the testing network of EOS:

1. Open your terminal and install EOS command line tools

The below command is for Mac. See the official document for installation if you are using other operating systems.

brew tap eosio/eosiobrew install eosio

If you do not have brew, a package manager for MacOS, enter the following command first:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

2. Generate a public key to manage the EOS account you are about to create

cleos create key --to-console

The name Cleos stands for CLI(Command Line Interface)+EOS. See the official document for more detailed explanation.

3. Create an EOS account

Go to Jungle Testnet, the most well-maintained testnet by now, and create a new EOS account by entering your 12-character account name and copy-pasting the public key you just generated. Remember that the name you entered must be unique.

Also, you can keep your owner public key and active public key the same for now. In short, the owner public key has the highest permission, and the active public key can perform most of the transactions expect changing the owner.

If the processing takes too long, refresh the entire website and try again;)

If you see something like this, your account has been created successfully :D

Account Successfully Created on Jungle Testnet

4. View your account info here by typing in your 12-char account name

From here, you can see that you don’t have any balance in your account, some details of your account creation time, and the public key that you just pasted.

View Account Info on Jungle Testnet

5. Get free EOS tokens through the faucet

Enter your account name and press “Send Coins” to receive the tokens. Proceed to the next step if you see the following screen.

Get Free EOS Tokens Through Faucet

6. Verify your account balance by viewing your account info here

Now congrats on successfully getting 100 EOS and 100 JUNGLE tokens!:)

View Account Info on Jungle Testnet

Useful Tools and Websites

Similar to what Ethereum has, EOS has its own testing network and blockchain explorers. The below is a list of my most commonly used websites.

1. Jungle Testnet Blockchain Explorer

Jungle testnet is the most widely used testnet by far. It has a faucet where you can get free EOS tokens to start deploying your smart contracts, simply by entering your account name just like what you have done in the above section.

2. The EOS Official Developer’s Guide

The EOS team actually created a comprehensive and error-free guide on its official website. I recommend this because it can walk you through important topics such as deploying and issuing tokens on EOS, creating your first smart contract, and interacting with it. The official website is also using the latest EOS version. It is the best place to start learning EOS compared to other tutorials online which is highly possible to be using outdated versions.

3. The EOS Official Github

To be honest, as an Ethereum developer, I seldom check the official Github repository of Ethereum. However, because there is too few documents for EOS libraries usage, I have to check the source code on Github in order to properly use the libraries most of the time. Most of the source code of EOS is well organized and highly readable. In addition, you can also find a number of smart contract examples here.

Wrap up

Now you have created your first EOS account, know how to get some free EOS tokens from a faucet, and querying your account information.

Thank you so much for reading and I will be extremely grateful if you can share this with someone who might be interested :) Any suggestions are welcomed!