Constructors

A contract may need to initialize its state before it is ready for public use. For example, one may want to designate a contract owner, that can do certain operations that other users can’t. Setting a storage variable to the owner can be done by the contract constructor. The contract constructor is defined using the @constructor decorator and its name must be constructor. The constructor semantics are similar to that of any other external function, except that the constructor is guaranteed to run during the contract deployment and it cannot be invoked again after the contract is deployed.

For example, we can define an ownable contract as follows:

%lang starknet

from starkware.cairo.common.cairo_builtins import HashBuiltin

# Define a storage variable for the owner address.
@storage_var
func owner() -> (owner_address : felt):
end

@constructor
func constructor{
        syscall_ptr : felt*, pedersen_ptr : HashBuiltin*,
        range_check_ptr}(owner_address : felt):
    owner.write(value=owner_address)
    return ()
end

Save the contract as ownable.cairo, compile and deploy it. When you deploy the contract, pass the arguments using the --inputs argument. The number of inputs must match the signature of the constructor. Otherwise, the deploy transaction will fail.

starknet-compile ownable.cairo \
    --output ownable_compiled.json \
    --abi ownable_abi.json
starknet deploy --contract ownable_compiled.json --inputs 123

When a contract is deployed, the contract address, contract definition hash and the constructor calldata are included in the on-chain data.