5. How to make a manifest on ArDrive

Set metadata using the least amount of gas

Before You Start

Now that you've made all the metadata for all your tokens in the previous tutorials, and uploaded all the metadata somewhere, now is time to decide if you want to create a manifest on ArDrive or not.

Creating a manifest on ArDrive will let you save a lot of gas when creating each token because you won't have to enter in an Arweave tx for each piece of metadata. With a manifest, you add the manifest tx id into the Base URI, and the Token URIs contain much less info, saving lots of gas. This gives all files in a collection a common address and makes keeping track of all the metadata files a lot easier once it is setup.

Before you start, make sure you renamed all the files to the smallest name you can possibly make! That means removing the file extensions as ArDrive will automatically add the file extensions to files. So don't forget that or you might not end up with the most gas optimized setup.

Step By Step

To create a manifest on ArDrive:

1. Go to the ArDrive website https://ardrive.io/

Your life. Saved forever.ArDrive

2. Sign into ArDrive

3. Make sure all the metadata files you want to be a part of your collection are uploaded and in the same folder.

4. Click the "New" button in the sidebar

5. Click "Create Manifest"

6. Name the manifest something that is similar to the manifest folder name

7. Find the folder full of files that you will make a manifest for. Click the "Create Here" button.

8. Confirm creating the manifest.

9. You will find your newly created manifest in the folder.

Once you have created a manifest for all of your metadata, you can use that single link of the manifest as the BaseURI for your contract. This will let you name the TokenURIs short links, like in this example the song's metadata will be 1 character each. 1, 2, and 3.

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