Acurast Studio

Deploy serverless jobs to the Acurast decentralized compute network — without leaving VS Code.

Manage encrypted wallets, edit acurast.json, estimate cost, and deploy to Mainnet or Canary from a single panel. The bundled @acurast/sdk handles signing, IPFS upload, and submission — no hand-editing .env.

What is this?

Acurast is a decentralized serverless compute network built on a Substrate chain. Acurast Studio wraps the @acurast/sdk inside VS Code so you can go from script to a live, on-chain job in a few clicks — project scaffolding, wallet creation, IPFS upload, cost estimate, and submission all happen in the editor.

Who it's for: developers building and shipping jobs to Acurast who want a guided UI instead of juggling the CLI, raw mnemonics, and .env files.

Features

Studio panel

• 🧰 All-in-one activity-bar view — Home, Wallets, Project Settings, Deploy, Processors, History, and Tunnel DNS in one panel, no CLI required.
• 🪄 Project scaffolding — Acurast: Init Project is a native wizard: pick the runtime (Node.js or Shell), the schedule, and — for Shell — the rootfs image, and it writes acurast.json, a starter entrypoint, and a README for you.
• 🔐 Encrypted wallet vault — create, import, rename, and delete sr25519 wallets. Mnemonics are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM + PBKDF2 (210k iterations) inside VS Code's SecretStorage, so even a keychain dump still needs your password.
• 📊 Live balance — wallet balance refreshes every 30 seconds while you're on the Wallets view.

Deploying

• 🚀 One-click deploy — packages your script, uploads it to IPFS, and submits the job to Mainnet or Canary, with a live stage-by-stage progress view.
• 🔨 Project build step — declare a build block in acurast.json (command, cwd, output) and Studio runs your toolchain — cargo, make, a bundler, anything — before deploy, or on demand via Acurast: Build. Requires a trusted workspace.
• ✅ Pre-deploy validation — blocking schema errors and non-blocking advisories (missing Shell image, a start time inside the unsafe window, onlyAttestedDevices: false, too-tight interval timing) surfaced before you spend anything.
• 💸 Cost estimation — preview ACU spend before you deploy, with optional fiat conversion (CoinGecko / CoinMarketCap) and cached exchange rates.
• 🐧 Shell runtime image catalog — Shell deploys need a proot-distro rootfs URL and its SHA256. Pick both from a dropdown in Project Settings instead of hand-copying them, and refresh the catalog from upstream on demand (aarch64 only — Acurast processors are Android ARM64 devices).
• ⏱️ Duration converter — type 2h 30m and get milliseconds, from the clock buttons next to every ms field or the Convert Duration to Milliseconds command.

After deploy

• 📜 Deployment history — a persistent, cross-workspace log of every deploy: project path, tx hash, IPFS hash, and job IDs.
• 🔗 On-chain history — fetch your live job registrations straight from the chain, with schedule, slots, reward, required modules, assignments, an expiry countdown for running jobs, and a derived status (active / scheduled / expired).
• 🩺 Job diagnosis — when a deployment isn't matching or running, run an on-chain diagnosis that checks processor version, requirements, and assignment state and tells you why.
• 🗑️ Deregister & bulk cleanup — deleting a record removes it locally and signs an on-chain deregister when the job is still registered. Multi-select several at once and they're batched into a single utility.forceBatch per network.

Beyond deploys

• 🖥️ Processors — inspect the processors your wallet manages, edit their advertised modules (DataEncryption, LLM, Shell), and put a never-advertised processor on the marketplace with a guided "Start advertising" flow.
• 🌐 Tunnel DNS — a three-step wizard (configure → records → verify) that derives the DNS records for exposing a deployment over the Acurast tunnel on your own domain, then verifies they resolve.
• ✍️ First-class acurast.json — a dedicated acurast-config language with schema-driven completion, hover docs, live diagnostics, syntax highlighting, and its own file icon. Multi-config workspaces are supported, with a right-click "Set as Active acurast.json".
• ⚠️ Network-mismatch guard — the status bar and Deploy/Settings views warn (with a one-click fix) when the network you're monitoring differs from the one your project deploys to.
• 🛡️ Workspace-trust aware — build commands, the CLI path, and custom RPC/matcher/relay endpoints are all restricted in untrusted workspaces.

Coming soon

• 📡 Live monitoring — stream logs and runtime metrics from your running jobs directly in the editor.

Getting started

1. Install Acurast Studio from the Marketplace.
2. Open a workspace that contains an acurast.json — or run Acurast: Init Project to scaffold one from scratch (no external CLI needed).
3. Click the Acurast logo in the activity bar to open the Studio panel.
4. Create or import a wallet, fund it, then hit Deploy.

The extension auto-activates as soon as a workspace contains an acurast.json.

Configuration

Note: acurast.network sets the network you monitor (balance, processors, history, status bar). Deploys always use the network field in your acurast.json. If the two differ, Acurast Studio shows a one-click prompt to align them.

Commands

All commands live under the Acurast category in the Command Palette (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+P).

(Additional wallet commands — copy address, set active, delete, edit description — are available under the same category. Set as Active acurast.json is a right-click action in the explorer and editor rather than a palette command, since it needs a file.)

Requirements

• VS Code 1.120 or newer
• A workspace containing an acurast.json file (use Acurast: Init Project if you don't have one yet)

Security

Your seed phrase never leaves your machine in plaintext. Each mnemonic is encrypted with AES-256-GCM, keyed by PBKDF2-SHA256 (210,000 iterations, OWASP 2023 guidance), and the ciphertext is what's stored in VS Code SecretStorage. Revealing a mnemonic always requires your password.

Acurast Studio also respects Workspace Trust. Wallets, balance, and history work anywhere; a project's build.command runs an arbitrary shell command and is refused in untrusted workspaces; and the settings that pick a host executable or redirect a network endpoint (acurast.cliPath, acurast.rpcOverrides, acurast.matcherUrls, acurast.tunnelRelays) can't be overridden by an untrusted workspace.

Links

• 🌐 Acurast website
• 📦 @acurast/sdk on npm
• 🐙 Source & issues on GitHub

❤️ Support development

Acurast Studio is built and maintained independently. If it saves you time, a small donation directly funds new features and ongoing maintenance. 🙏

Prefer to connect a wallet? Use the donation page — a non-custodial page to send ACU or DOT straight from Polkadot.js / Talisman / SubWallet. You can open it (or copy the addresses) from the Home panel in the extension too.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome — see the repository.

npm install
npm run build:dev   # build extension + webview with sourcemaps
npm run watch       # watch both bundles in parallel
npm run typecheck   # type-check without emitting
npm test            # unit + integration tests

License

MIT