Thread by @ContrastiveNFT

Interested in launching your own NFT drop on @solana but not sure how?
A few people have been DM'ing us asking how to set up their own Candy Machine 🍬 NFT minting program on @metaplex. Here's a quick unofficial tutorial from reading the source code.
🧵1/n

2/ First fork the @metaplex repo github.com/metaplex-found…
then install all package dependencies (takes a sec)
```
cd js
yarn
```

3/ Now we'll want to create our NFT media itself. Take your beloved jpegs (actually the should be .png lol) and add them to a folder (e.g. in the root dir), naming them `0.png`, `1.png` etc.

4/ As well as the `.png` image files, we need accompanying `.json` metadata files for each with the same naming scheme, e.g. `0.json` corresponds to our `0.png` image.

5/ The JSON files should be laid out like so:
```
{
"name": "Based Bartosz NFT #1",
"symbol": "",
"seller_fee_basis_points": 0,
"properties": {
"creators": [
{ "address": "<your_address_here>", "share": 100 }
]
}
}
```

6/ Now navigate to the `cli` package source where we can start to run the cli tools:
```
cd packages/cli/src/
```

7/ Then upload the aforementioned (png, json) pairs to the @ArweaveTeam network using the following. This is where our files are stored immutably on the perma-web to be accessed later 🕸️
```
ts-node cli upload ~/path/to/your/images -k ~/.config/solana/id.json
```

8/ Now to create your Candy Machine! 🍬

You can specify the mint price of your NFT (in SOL) using the `-p` flag as shown:
```
ts-node cli create_candy_machine -k ~/.config/solana/id.json -p 1
```

This should also print the PDA of your candy machine.

9/ Next, we want to set the start date, after which our NFTs will be freely available for the public to mint ⏲️
```
ts-node cli set_start_date -k ~/.config/solana/id.json -d "04 Sep 2021 00:00:00 GMT"
```

10/ Here comes the fun part. Now that our Candy Machine is locked and loaded, it's time to mint 🖨️

For example, here we are minting to our own key, however you could specify any key here to mint to.
```
ts-node cli mint_one_token -k ~/.config/solana/id.json
```

11/ You can now go and check out your brand new NFT on @phantom or @StepFinance_ !

Here's one we designed earlier for our upcoming @ContrastiveNFT Metaverse I Collection 🌌

12/ Massive shoutout to @redacted_j , @baalazamon and the rest of the @metaplex team for putting this together and grinding out the late nights.

Super excited for the next wave of exciting NFT projects that now have access to a well-engineered fair launch minting system!

13/ If you're keen to see more NFT alpha from us and want to stay up to date on the cutting edge of AI generative art on @solana, feel free to like, RT and follow us @ContrastiveNFT as well as join our Discord community discord.gg/bcB38Njac7
#solana #SolanaSummer #SolanaNFTs

UPDATE: JSON should be as follows, tyvm @Koenrad 🙏
{
"name": "<name>",
"symbol": "",
"seller_fee_basis_points": 0,
"image": "image.png",
"properties": {
"creators": [{"address": "<address>", "share": 100}],
"files": [{"uri": "image.png","type": "image/png"}]}
}