nockchain/crates/nockvm/docs/pills.md

Making your own pill to run with Ares

Ares development and testing, unlike regular development and ship operation, currently requires careful control over what pill is used to launch a ship. This document details how pills are created for the purposes of development and testing.

Example: baby.pill

baby.pill is an extremely minimal Arvo-shaped core and Hoon standard library equipped with %sham jets needed to run it. ~wicdev-wisryt streamed a video of its development. You can find the source Hoon for baby.pill in resources/pills/src/baby/baby.hoon, and the limited version of Hoon that it uses in resources/pills/src/baby/cradle.hoon. A pre-compiled baby.pill is already available at resources/pills/baby.pill. However, the steps to compile it yourself are documented below.

1. Boot a fake zod using an ordinary Urbit executable (not the one you created to run Ares as serf)
2. Run |mount %base
3. Copy the contents of resources/pills/src/baby/ to /path/to/fake/zod/base/lib/
4. Run |commit %base
5. Run .baby/pill -build-file %/lib/baby/hoon. This will make a file named baby.pill in /path/to/fake/zod/.urb/put/

You can now use this pill to boot a ship using your Vere + Ares executable:

./ares-urbit -F dev -B /path/to/fake/zod/.urb/put/baby.pill

If it writes effect to the terminal with every keystroke, you have succeeded!