CorDapp Standard Development Environment (CSDE)
The CorDapp Standard Development Environment (CSDE) makes the process of prototyping CorDapps on Developer Preview 2 more straight-forward.
The CSDE is obtained by cloning our CSDE-Cordapp-Template-Kotlin
repository to your local machine. The CSDE provides:
- A prepared CorDapp project that you can use as a starting point to develop your own prototypes
- A base Gradle configuration that brings in the dependencies you need to write and test a Corda 5 CorDapp
- A set of Gradle helper tasks which speed up and simplify the development and deployment process; these are effectively wrappers over the Corda CLI
- Debug configuration for debugging a local Corda cluster
- The
MyFirstFlow
code which forms the basis of the Getting Started documentation - The ability to configure the members of the local Corda network
Downloading the CSDE
To obtain the CSDE template, clone the CSDE-Cordapp-Template-Kotlin repository:
git clone https://github.com/corda/CSDE-cordapp-template-kotlin.git <local-folder>
Change to the new directory and checkout the Developer Preview 2 branch:
git checkout release/corda-5-developer-preview-2
Initialise the git repo and change the remote so you do not inadvertently push your work back to our R3 repo.
Open the project in IntelliJ and let the import process complete. When complete, the project structure looks as follows:
CSDE project
Configuring the CSDE
The CSDE includes Gradle tasks to manage a local deployment of Corda. These Gradle tasks require Java Azul Zulu 11. To configure IntelliJ to use the correct Java version for Gradle, set Gradle JVM to Project SDK 11
, as follows:

CSDE Overview
This section provides an overview of the content of CSDE. Other sections show you how to use it in the process of writing a CorDapp.
Project Structure
On the left, you can see the folder structure created, ready for CorDapps development.
You will write your flow code in src/main/kotlin/<your package path>
and your flow tests in src/test/kotlin/<your package path>
.
(For Java, use src/main/java/<your package path>
and src/test/java/<your package path>
respectively.)
Gradle Helpers for the Combined Worker
On the right, you can see the Gradle tasks that we have included to help you work with a local deployment of Corda using the combined worker:
startCorda
The startCorda
task does the following:
- Downloads and locally stores a copy of the combined worker JAR, if required
- Starts an instance of a Postgres Docker container; you will need Docker Engine or Docker Desktop running
- Starts the combined worker
startCorda
task if any existing local programs are using ports 5432, 7000, or 8888. Reserve these ports.stopCorda
The stopCorda
task does the following:
- Stops the Postgres database
- Stops the combined worker
deployCorDapp
The deployCorDapp
task does the following to compile and deploy the CorDapp to the combined worker:
- Compiles the CPB and CPI using the buildcpi task
- Uploads the CPI to the combined worker
- Generates the virtual nodes with the CPI
buildCPI
The buildCPI
task compiles your CorDapp into a CPI file.
listVNodes
The listVNodes
task displays a list of the virtual nodes on the local Corda cluster.
Debug Configuration
In the toolbar, you can select the DebugCorDapp
run configuration to debug the running Corda from IntelliJ.

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