Highlights of what’s new in 0.7.0

The 0.7.0 release primarily consists of changes to support new features that are not yet complete, including fixes and updates to DFX commands, Motoko, the Motoko base library, and Candid.

The most significant new features and capabilities are updates to the following:

New features and capabilities

DFX

  • Addition of ledger subcommands

    dfx now supports a dedicated dfx ledger subcommand. This allows you to interact with the ledger canister installed on the Internet Computer. Example commands include dfx ledger account-id which prints the Account Identifier associated with your selected identity, dfx ledger transfer which allows you to transfer ICP from your ledger account to another, and dfx ledger create-canister which allows you to create a canister from ICP. For more information on dfx ledger subcommands, see dfx ledger.

  • Addition of wallet subcommands

    dfx now supports a dedicated dfx wallet subcommand. This allows you to interact with the cycles wallet associated with your selected identity.

    The following are just some of the available commands:

    • dfx wallet balance returns the selected identity’s cycles wallet balance.

    • dfx wallet list-addresses displays the assigned controllers & custodians of the cycles wallet.

      You can use dfx wallet send <destination> <amount> to send cycles to another wallet.

      For more information on dfx wallet see dfx wallet.

  • Add an output type to the request-status subcommand.

    This change allows you to specify the format for the return result for dfx canister request-status. Formatting options include idl, raw, and pp.

  • The default network for projects is now ic.

    The default network is now the mainnet ic unless otherwise specified. Additionally, --network ic now points to the mainnet Internet Computer (Sodium has been deprecated.)

  • Automatic creation of a candid UI canister

    A dedicated candid UI canister is installed on a local network when using dfx canister install or dfx deploy.

  • Compress some content types

    You can now store gzip content encodings of assets with media types if the encoding is smaller than the source contents. Supported file types are text/*, */javascript, and */html.

  • Add the encoding size when listing assets

    Now when assets are listed, a new length field returns the size of encodings.

  • Add new command dfx canister info

    This allows you to retrieve certified canister information. Access to this information is limited to the controller of the canister and the SHA256 hash of its WASM module. If there is no WASM module installed, the hash will be None.

  • New method deletes asset canister assets that no longer exist in a project—breaking change

    The keys() method is no longer supported. Use the list() method to delete missing project assets. For example:

    assert_command dfx canister call --query e2e_project_assets get '(record{key="/will-delete-this.txt";accept_encodings=vec{"identity"}})'
assert_command dfx canister call --query e2e_project_assets list  '(record{})'
assert_match '"/will-delete-this.txt"'

  • Run an emulator instead of the replica

    To run a dfx project using an emulator instead of the replica, you can now run dfx start --emulator.

  • Rely on npmjs.org to get the version of agent-js to install

    This decouples the version of dfx from the release version of agent-js. Additionally, it allows for debug builds to install properly (as dfx has a non-release version).

  • You can now install the DFINITY Canister SDK on for M1 Macs running Darwin.

  • Allow upload of assets of any size to the asset canister.

    The following asset canister call methods are added: create_batch() create_chunk() commit_batch() get() ** get_chunk()

    + Reworks the asset installer in dfx to use these methods. It can therefore upload assets that exceed the message ingress size.

  • Add --no-wallet flag and --wallet option

    --no-wallet allows users to bypass specifying a wallet ID.

    --wallet allows users to specify a particular wallet to use for calls.

  • Implement the HTTP request proposal in dfx bootstrap webserver

    Adds support for http requests in the base storage canister (with a default to /index.html).

This does not support encodings other than identity, and doesn’t return any headers.

This also upgrades tokio and reqwest in order to work correctly. There are some performance issues to note (this is slower than the icx-http-server).

Motoko

  • Reformat to style guidelines.

  • Add type bindings

    Add Nat.Nat, Nat8.Nat8, etc. to libraries for primitive types.

Issues fixed in this release

This section covers any reported issues that have been fixed in this release.

DFX

  • Deleting a canister on a network removes entries for other networks

    This change fixes a bug where deleting a canister on a network removed all other entries for the canister in the canister_ids.json file.

  • Error message: already in use (os error 48) when issuing dfx start.

    This fixes an error which occurred when starting a replica soon after stopping it.

  • The dfx new command should not require node

    This fixes the inability to use the dfx new command to create projects on machines that do not have node.js installed.

  • Missing webpack.config plugin

    This adds the missing ProvidePlugin to webpack.config for new projects.

  • Allow new projects assets to contain non-utf8 files

    Previously assets were forced to be valid UTF-8 strings. After this change if a string cannot be converted, in-place variable replacements are ignored.

Motoko

  • No longer confused by distinct, but eponymous, type definitions.

  • Numbers of eponymous types and specializations from 1 (not 2)

  • Avoids long chains of type equalities by normalizing before translation