Developer weekly update December 2, 2022

Hi everyone and happy Friday! I’d like to share some highlights from the SDK team for this week.

New features and changes

Keyring integration

You’ll now be able to use the OS-native keyring to decrypt your identity. Sure beats having to type your password for every command.

If keyring integration is available, PEM files (except for the default identity) are now by default stored in the OS-provided keyring. If it is not available, it will fall back on the already existing password-encrypted PEM files. Plaintext PEM files are still available (e.g. for use in non-interactive situations like CI), but not recommended for use since they put the keys at risk.

To force the use of one specific storage mode, use the --storage-mode flag with either --storage-mode password-protected or --storage-mode plaintext. This works for both dfx identity new and dfx identity import.

The flag --disable-encryption is deprecated in favour of --storage-mode plaintext. It has the same behavior.

Motoko 0.7.4

The latest version of dfx includes version 0.7.4 of Motoko, which fixed some bugs and introduced a few new language features. See the Motoko release notes here.

In-flight

dfx pull

This feature allows you to pull in third party dependencies automatically via dfx, rather than building and installing each manually. This should make it much smoother to build integrations with canisters such as Internet Identity, InfinitySwap, or others.

Check out the full changelog here.

Other fun stuff

I’ve been an avid user of the Arc browser since it launched, and I have had such a good experience with it, I want to share it with you. I have one invite code I can give to one lucky forum member, so whoever grabs this first can try Arc right away, without having to join the waitlist.

More on the Arc browser: Arc Browser: Early Access Look | App Review - YouTube.

Have a wonderful weekend and build something great!