Your first NFT in 10 minutes

⏱ 10 min · 🎯 you'll have: a Metaplex NFT scaffold ready to mint on devnet.

We'll go from empty folder to a mintable NFT program using sunscreen's quickstart recipe.

Pre-requisites

  • sunscreen (Installing).
  • anchor CLI, solana CLI, Node 18+ with pnpm.
  • A Solana keypair (we'll create one if you don't have it).

Run sunscreen doctor to confirm. Anything missing will be flagged.

Step 1 — Quickstart

sunscreen quickstart nft my-first-nft
cd my-first-nft

This single command:

  1. Created an Anchor workspace with a Vite frontend.
  2. Scaffolded a Metaplex NFT recipe slice (mint, metadata, master edition).
  3. Added a sample frontend hook for minting (TanStack Query).

You'll see a summary table at the end listing files created.

Tip

quickstart is a composition of more granular commands: chain new, scaffold metaplex-nft, generate frontend-hooks. You can run them individually for more control — quickstart is the beginner-friendly shortcut.

## Step 2 — Build 
sunscreen chain build

Successful build produces target/idl/my_first_nft.json and regenerates Codama clients into app/src/clients/ (auto-wired because we picked the React frontend).

Step 3 — Configure a devnet wallet

If you don't have a Solana keypair:

sunscreen wallet new dev
sunscreen wallet set-default dev --cluster devnet

The first command creates a keypair under .sunscreen/wallets/dev.json and prints the public key. The second makes it sunscreen's default for devnet operations.

Get devnet SOL:

sunscreen wallet airdrop 2 --cluster devnet

If the airdrop is throttled (common), the error tells you the next step (use solana airdrop directly or a public faucet).

Step 4 — Deploy plan

sunscreen deploy devnet --dry-run

Sunscreen prints a deploy plan: how much SOL you need, what's going to be uploaded. No on-chain action yet — it's a --dry-run.

When ready:

sunscreen deploy devnet

You'll get a program ID. Save it.

Step 5 — Mint

The Vite frontend in app/ is already wired with the Codama-generated client and the mint hook. Start it:

cd app
pnpm install
pnpm dev

Open http://localhost:5173 (Vite's default). Connect your wallet (the same one you funded), click Mint, approve. After a few seconds you'll see the mint signature.

You just minted an NFT through a program you wrote — even though sunscreen wrote most of it for you.

What happened end-to-end

quickstart nft           → workspace + Metaplex recipe + frontend hooks
chain build             → anchor build → IDL → Codama clients
wallet new / airdrop    → fund a keypair on devnet
deploy devnet           → upload program, register program ID
frontend pnpm dev       → Vite app calls the generated client → mints

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