Deploying to devnet

⏱ 6 min · 🎯 you'll have: your program deployed on Solana devnet, with the program ID wired into your config.

Pre-requisites

If you don't have a keypair yet:

sunscreen wallet new dev

This writes a new keypair under .sunscreen/wallets/dev.json and prints the public key. Save the recovery words if prompted.

Make it the default for localnet/devnet so subsequent commands pick it up:

sunscreen wallet set-default dev --cluster devnet

You need ~2 SOL for a fresh deploy:

sunscreen wallet airdrop 2 --cluster devnet

If you see Network: rate-limited, the public faucet throttled you. Options:

Check the balance:

sunscreen wallet balance --cluster devnet

Always inspect the plan first:

sunscreen deploy devnet --dry-run

The dry run prints the planned Anchor invocation, the wallet that will pay, and the balance check.

sunscreen deploy devnet

Or deploy only one program in a multi-program workspace:

sunscreen deploy devnet --program my_app

On success Anchor updates Anchor.toml with the new program ID. Sunscreen surfaces the result and the program addresses.

solana program show <program-id> --url devnet

You should see the program account with the correct authority and data length.

If you have a frontend:

sunscreen generate clients

This rewrites clients/<program>/ against the now-deployed program ID. Restart your pnpm dev so it picks up the new clients.

Each subsequent deploy is incremental:

sunscreen chain build
sunscreen deploy devnet

Solana's solana program deploy handles the upgrade in place, reusing the program ID.

Symptom	Cause	Fix
`insufficient funds`	not enough SOL	airdrop or use the web faucet
`program too large`	binary > buffer size	check `--max-len` on `solana program deploy`, or upgrade in chunks
`transaction simulation failed`	program-side check failed	run the test suite locally first
`BlockhashNotFound`	RPC overloaded or clock skew	retry; consider a private RPC (Helius, Triton)