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Use the Aptos NFT Minting Tool

The Aptos Non-Fungible Token (NFT) Minting Tool allows NFT creators to upload assets, create NFT collections and run mint sites. This document explains how to launch an NFT project with the CLI and get the mint site up and running. The tool can be found in this GitHub repo.

This tool is tested on Mac, yet it should work on Linux and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) too.

Setup​

Confirm or install Node and NPM​

Node is required to run the Minting Tool CLI. If nodejs is not available on your operating system, make sure to install that first.

Install Aptos CLI​

Install the Aptos CLI. The Aptos CLI is needed for compiling and deploying the minting contract.

Configure Aptos account​

The minting tool needs to locate your Aptos CLI profile from your user’s home folder. Run the following command after downloading Aptos CLI to make the CLI write and read config files in your user’s home folder:

aptos config set-global-config --config-type global

Create a new CLI profile for the NFT minting. Make sure that you choose testnet or mainnet. The devnet network is not supported.

If you want to reuse the existing account that you generated in Petra Wallet or other wallets, provide the private key of the account when prompted:

aptos init --profile nft_mint

Now nft_mint is your user profile name.

Get the minting tool​

  1. Download the latest Aptos NFT Minting Tool aptos-mint Tar gzip file.
  2. Install the Aptos NFT Minting Tool with: npm install -g <download-path>/aptos-mint-v0.0.1.tgz
  3. Verify the tool is installed correctly by running this command and receiving a version number: aptos-mint --version

Create the first NFT collection​

Prepare the assets​

The most popular tool for generating NFT assets is HashLips. You can generate NFT assets with HashLips or another tool of your choosing. The aptos-mint command works with the images and metadata generated by HashLips out of the box.

To make it easy to follow along, we uploaded sample assets to hashlips_assets.zip.

Download the assets and decompress the compressed file.

The metadata format we need is as simple as the following:

{ "attributes": [ { "trait_type": "Background", "value": "Black" }, { "trait_type": "Eyeball", "value": "Red" } ] }

Note: Other fields from HashLips are ignored.

Each NFT should have a separate metadata file in JSON format. All NFT metadata files need to be placed within a directory (folder) named json. All NFT asset files need to be placed within another directory named images. The json and images directories need to be under the same parent directory, like so:

nft_assets/
├─ images/
│ ├─ 1.png
│ ├─ 2.png
│ ├─ 3.png
│ ├─ ...
├─ json/
│ ├─ 1.json
│ ├─ 2.json
│ ├─ ...

Each pair of image and metadata files represent an NFT. E.g. 1.png and 1.json in the above example are the asset and metadata files of the first NFT.

Create an NFT project​

  1. Create a project called test with the command: aptos-mint init --name test --asset-path <decompressed-asset-folder> Note: Set the public_minting_start_time to be a couple of minutes later to give the tool enough time to add tokens into the collection.
  2. Change your current directory to test with the command: cd test

Compile and publish the smart contract​

From the test directory, run the command: aptos-mint publish-contract --profile nft_mint.

Fund the storage service​

To upload assets to Arweave, we need to purchase credits. Bundlr makes the process easier. We need to fund the Bundlr service before we can upload assets.

  1. Fund Bundlr with aptos-mint fund --profile nft_mint --amount 10000000
  2. Check the balance with: aptos-mint balance --profile nft_mint

Upload the assets​

Once again in the test directory, run this command to upload assets: aptos-mint upload --profile nft_mint

Run the minting website​

Now you can run the minting site and start minting NFTs.

  1. Get the minting site code from GitHub.

  2. Change the current directory to the minting site folder and run: npm install

  3. Run the following command, updating REACT_APP_MINTING_CONTRACT with the correct resource account address and REACT_APP_NODE_URL with the correct fullnode URL:

    REACT_APP_MINTING_CONTRACT="<resource-account-address>" REACT_APP_NODE_URL="<fullnode-network-URL>" npm run start

    The account address needs to be prefixed with 0x and can be found in <nft-project-folder>/config.json by key contractAddress. The REACT_APP_NODE_URL for testnet is https://fullnode.testnet.aptoslabs.com and for mainnet https://fullnode.mainnet.aptoslabs.com.

    Then visit the minting site at: http://localhost:3000

    Mint away!