bet

Building `bet` from source

bet is a C poker app that links against the user’s system Verus toolchain via the verus CLI. There is no compile-time dependency on Verus; you can build bet first and pair it with any verus binary at runtime.

The build has been tested on Ubuntu 20.04 / 22.04 and recent Debian-based systems. macOS builds (Intel + Apple Silicon) work with the Homebrew packages noted at the end.

For getting a local VRSCTEST chain running, see docs/tutorials/cli-auto-vrsctest.md. The present document covers only the bet binary itself.

1. System packages

Ubuntu / Debian:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y \
  build-essential autoconf automake libtool pkg-config git make \
  libgmp-dev libsqlite3-dev libssl-dev \
  libcurl4-gnutls-dev libevent-dev libsodium-dev \
  libwebsockets-dev

If libwebsockets-dev is not packaged (older Ubuntu releases), the repository ships a vendored copy under external/libwebsockets/ that make will pick up; in that case you’ll additionally need cmake (the repository also vendors a CMake submodule but a system CMake is faster).

macOS (Homebrew):

brew install autoconf automake libtool pkg-config \
  gmp openssl@3 sqlite libevent libsodium libwebsockets

The macOS rules in poker/Makefile automatically point CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS at /opt/homebrew/opt/openssl/ on Apple Silicon.

2. Cloning

The build pulls vendored libraries (iniparser, jsmn, dlg, nng, libwebsockets, libwally-core) as Git submodules. Clone recursively, or initialise them after the fact:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/<your-fork>/bet.git
cd bet
# or, post-clone:
# git submodule update --init --recursive

3. Compiling

The simplest invocation builds vendored crypto and the bet binary in one go from the repository root:

make -j$(nproc)

Internally this runs make -C libs/crypto followed by make -C poker, producing:

poker/bin/bet — the poker daemon (used as dealer, player, cashier, and CLI front-end depending on the first argument).
poker/bin/cashierd — symlink copy of the same binary, kept for legacy launch scripts.

If you only want to rebuild after a code change inside poker/src/, just run make inside poker/:

cd poker && make -j$(nproc)

A clean reset:

make clean      # at the repo root, cleans poker + vendored libs

4. Sanity check

cd poker
./bin/bet --version    # prints the git-derived VERSION string
./bin/bet help         # lists the available subcommands

If the wrapper script you’ll run for tests is in poker/, you can launch the dealer/player/cashier from there with:

./bin/bet dealer
./bin/bet player -c config/p1.ini
./bin/bet cashier

See dealer_configuration.md and player_configuration.md for the config files each command consults.

5. Connecting to a chain

bet invokes the verus CLI as a subprocess (popen()-style) for every on-chain operation. Two things have to be true at runtime:

The chain’s daemon (verusd -chain=VRSCTEST for the dev regtest) is running and the wallet holds keys for the identities referenced in keys.ini / dealer.ini / player.ini.
The verus binary is on the PATH of the user running bet. The convention used in development is to symlink it into /usr/local/bin/:
```
sudo ln -sf /path/to/VerusCoin/src/verus /usr/local/bin/verus
```
Without this, bet exits early with sh: 1: verus: not found because popen() runs each subshell with a minimal PATH.

The full bring-up of the local regtest, including the one-line verusd patch (-offline flag), Verus identity registration, and the helper tmux sessions, is documented in docs/tutorials/cli-auto-vrsctest.md.

bet