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Installation

Building, deploying, and running applications on SPF requires several tools: the Parasol compiler for FHE programs, the testnet client for interacting with the network, and optionally Foundry and Rust for smart contract development and local testing.

Prerequisites​

  • Operating System: Linux or macOS (Windows support via WSL)
  • Command-line proficiency: Basic familiarity with terminal commands

Parasol Compiler​

The Parasol compiler compiles C programs with FHE annotations into bytecode that runs on the Sunscreen Processing Framework (SPF). Compiler binaries are available on the GitHub releases for the sunscreen-llvm project.

Installation:

  1. Download the tarball for your platform from the latest release
  2. Extract the archive to a directory of your choice, e.g., ~/sunscreen-llvm/
  3. Add the bin/ directory to your PATH

Verify the installation:

clang --version

Output should resemble the following:

clang version 18.1.6 (git@github.com:Sunscreen-tech/sunscreen-llvm.git 9ead3b9fc2d01f1bc62e120a0a3944279c3a4039)
Target: unknown
Thread model: posix

Testnet Client​

The testnet client provides a command-line interface for interacting with the Sunscreen testnet, including deploying FHE programs and submitting computation requests. You can either download the the standalone SPF client CLI from our GitHub release page or by building from source from that repository.

Foundry (Optional - Smart Contract Development)​

Foundry is a development toolkit for Ethereum-compatible chains, providing tools to build, deploy, and interact with smart contracts. The examples in this documentation use Foundry for smart contract integration with SPF.

Installation:

curl -L https://foundry.paradigm.xyz | sh
foundryup

Installing Node.js (Optional - Web2 Development)​

The web2 approach uses the TypeScript spf-client library to interact directly with the SPF REST API. If Node.js is not already installed, download it from nodejs.org or install via a package manager

# macOS (via Homebrew)
brew install node

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt install nodejs npm

Next Steps​

With the required tools installed, proceed to the web2 example or web3 example to write, deploy and use your first FHE program with SPF.