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Get involved with the ao testnet

On February 27, 2024, ao Testnet was launched, for developers and early adopters to explore the hyper parallel computer.

What is the ao testnet?

The ao testnet is setup to allow users to interact with the ao computer without fees, to test and build towards mainnet.

The best way to get involved is to build and use the ao computer with the aos console. In the Things to do section below you will find many activities to try.

Installing the aos client

Once you have NodeJS on your machine, all you need to do is install aos and run it:

sh
$ npm i -g https://get_ao.g8way.io

Running this command at a later date will upgrade aos to the latest version. After installation, we can simply run the command itself to start a new aos process:

sh
$ aos

This will start a process named default. See the aos guide for more details.

First steps in the ao testnet

Follow the tutorials and learn to build on ao. Begin

Joining ao's native community chat

The ao network hosts a number of chat servers that allow you to converse with other devs, right from your aos console. To load the chat client run the following:

lua
aos> .load-blueprint chat

To show the available rooms you can run:

lua
aos> List()

You can join a room and start chatting with other devs as follows:

lua
aos> Join("Getting-Started", "yourName")
aos> Say("Hi")