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While OP Deployer was designed primarily for use with chains that are governed by Optimism, it also supports managing custom deployments. This is particularly common for RaaS providers, whose customers often request deployments with custom L1s (or L2s, in the case of L3s) or governance. This guide will walk you through the process of managing these chains using OP Deployer.
Chains deployed in this way are not subject to Optimism Governance. They may be running customized or unaudited code. Use at your own risk.

Bootstrapping

The first step to deploying a custom OP Stack is to bootstrap it onto an L1. This process will:
  • Deploy shared management contracts like SuperchainConfig and SuperchainVersions.
  • Deploy contract implementations that will be shared among all OP Chains in this deployment.
  • Set up ownership so that you can control the deployment.
You will use the bootstrap family of commands on op-deployer to do this.

Bootstrap Shared Contracts

Every OP Chain belongs to a logical deployment group. This group consists of a set of shared contracts that control the behavior of a group of OP Chains. This includes:
  • Pausing bridges
  • Signaling which protocol versions are required and recommended
You can deploy a new set of shared contracts for each OP Chain, or you can deploy them once and share across multiple OP Chains. The choice is up to the deployer. Note that you cannot share a set of shared contracts across multiple L1s. To begin, bootstrap the shared contracts onto your chosen L1 with the following command:
This will output a JSON file containing the addresses of the relevant contracts. Keep track of this file, as you will need it in subsequent steps. We recommend the following these best practices when bootstrapping:
  1. Use Gnosis SAFEs for ownership roles like guardian and superchain-proxy-admin-owner. The owner must be a smart contract to support future upgrades, so a SAFE is a sensible default.
  2. Use a regular EOA as the deployer. It will not have any control over the deployment once the deployment completes.
  3. Use the contracts that op-deployer embeds (embedded, the default). op-deployer runs only the contracts release that it was built with, or a build of that release.

Bootstrapping Implementations

The smart contracts for an OP Chain are deployed using a factory that points to a set of predeployed implementations. You must deploy the factory and the implementations every time you deploy to a new L1 and whenever new smart contract versions are released. Implementations are deployed using CREATE2, so addresses may be reused if they already exist on the L1.
You may need to use different versions of OP Deployer depending on which contracts version you are deploying. See the releases guide for more information on picking the right release.
To deploy the implementations, use the following command:
On L1s other than Ethereum mainnet and Sepolia, also pass --sp1-verifier-address with the raw SP1 verifier for the release’s SP1PlonkAdapter, or the command fails. On a development L1, --deploy-mock-sp1-verifier deploys an accept-all mock verifier instead. op-deployer apply takes the same input as globalDeployOverrides.sp1Verifier in the intent. Similar to the bootstrap superchain command, this will output a JSON file containing the addresses of the relevant contracts. Again, keep track of this file. The most important address in the implementations file is the OPCM, or OP Contracts Manager. This contract is the factory that will deploy all the OP Chains belonging to this deployment group. It is also responsible for upgrading between different contracts versions. Please keep the following very important invariants in mind with the OPCM:
  • There is a one-to-one mapping between each OPCM, and contracts version.
  • Each OPCM is associated with exactly one deployment group. This means that you must deploy a new OPCM using the bootstrap implementations command for each new deployment group you manage.

Deploying

After bootstrapping the contracts and implementations, you can deploy your L2 chains with the apply command. You will need to specify a configType of standard-overrides and set the opcmAddress field in your intent to the address of the OPCM above. Make sure you call the right OPCM. Failing to call the right OPCM might lead to deploying incorrect contract versions, or associating your chain with the wrong deployment.
Make sure that you use the same l1ContractsLocator and l2ContractsLocator as the ones used in the bootstrap commands. Otherwise, you may run into deployment errors.
See the following config for an example:
Once apply completes successfully, you can use the inspect family of commands to download your chain’s L2 genesis and rollup config files.

Upgrading

The op-deployer upgrade command supports upgrades up to op-contracts/v5.0.0 only. It does not support upgrading from op-contracts/v5.0.0 to op-contracts/v6.0.0. For upgrades beyond v5.0.0, use superchain-ops or interact with the OPCM directly. See the notice for details.