**Warning: This project is in beta state. There might (and most probably will) be changes in the future to its API and working. Also, no guarantees can be made about its stability, efficiency, and security at this stage.**
Bee Factory as the NPM package that you can install, like mentioned above, works in a way that it orchestrates launching Bee Factory Docker images
in correct order and awaits for certain initializations to happen in correct form. These Docker images are automatically built with our CI
upon every new Bee release, so you can just specify which version you want to run (starting with `1.5.1` version) as part of the `start` command.
If for some reason you want built your own images, that is possible but discouraged and not supported (**here be dragons**) using the scripts in the `generator` subfolder.
Upon building and publishing these images you can consume them using with Bee Factory with the `--repo` flag.
If you want to locally build the Bee Factory images, then edit the `./generator/scripts/.env` file with appropriate configuration
and then run the `./generator/scripts/build-environment.sh` script. This will build the images with the `ethersphere/bee-factory-*` tags.
Then simply run the `npm start -- <command>` with the appropriate version of Bee you have build.
The CLI should pickup local images prior trying to pull it from Docker Hub, so it will use your build ones.
### Updating Blockchain images
If Bee updated its smart contracts suite, then smart contracts needs to be updated in Bee Factory as well otherwise the spawned Bees might
have unpredictable behavior.
First of all you have to preprocess the smart contract's bytecodes. In Solidity the constructor parameters are passed to the contract by appending the parameters
ABI-encoded to the end of the bytecode (for more see for example [here](https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/58866/how-does-a-contracts-constructor-work-and-load-input-values)).
So you have to make sure that the bytecodes that you update are stripped of these constructor parameters.
This is because these parameters are then later on appended during smart contract deployment.
If only internal smart contract's logic has changed and there is no change to the smart contract's constructor, then you have to only
update the bytecodes. You do it by pasting the bytecodes to appropriate files in `./generator/contracts/` folder.
If there are new smart contracts or their constructor's have changed then you have to also modify the deploy script which is present in
`./generator/migrations/1_initial.js` file. **Don't remove the logging that starts with `::CONTRACT:`!** This serves to extract the deployed
contracts addresses and apply them to the Docker image's label.
If you are adding new smart contract than also add new `::CONTRACT:` log line that has format of `::CONTRACT:<bee-option-name>:<smart-contract-address>`,
where the `bee-option-name` stands for the option name that customize the contract's address in Bee.
Last step is to bump the `BLOCKCHAIN_VERSION` version in `./generator/scripts/.env` file.
