Ethereum Tools

Geth

Official golang implementation of the Ethereum protocol and is the most common for people wanting to interact with the Ethereum network.
By installing and running Geth, you can take part in the ethereum frontier live network and

• mine real ether
• transfer funds between addresses
• create contracts and send transactions
• explore block history
• and much much more

Ganache

It is the Personal blockchain for Ethereum development you can use to deploy contracts, develop your applications, and run tests. It is available as both a desktop application as well as a command-line tool (formerly known as the TestRPC). Ganache is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
When you launch Ganache, the screen will show some details about the server, and also list out a number of accounts. Each account is given 100 ether. Having ether automatically in all accounts allows you to focus on developing your application.

Truffle

A world class development environment, testing framework and asset pipeline for blockchains using the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), aiming to make life as a developer easier. With Truffle, you get:

• Built-in smart contract compilation, linking, deployment and binary management.
• Automated contract testing for rapid development.
• Scriptable, extensible deployment & migrations framework.
• Network management for deploying to any number of public & private networks.
• Package management with EthPM & NPM, using the ERC190 standard.
• Interactive console for direct contract communication.
• Configurable build pipeline with support for tight integration.
• External script runner that executes scripts within a Truffle environment.

Atom

Atom is a hackable text editor for the 21st century, built on Electron, and based on everything we love about our favorite editors. We designed it to be deeply customizable, but still approachable using the default configuration.
There are packages in Atom that can be used for Solidity compilation and Ethereum contract execution.

Puppeth

Puppeth runs helper applications and Ethereum nodes for you in Docker containers, so we need Docker. The first thing it’ll ask for is the network name. This is useful for identifying various blockchains if you’re running several on your local machine. A new genesis block can be created using Puppeth.

Metamask

MetaMask is an extension for accessing Ethereum enabled distributed applications, or “Dapps” in your normal Chrome browser!The extension injects the Ethereum web3 API into every website’s javascript context, so that dapps can read from the blockchain.

MetaMask also lets the user create and manage their own identities, so when a Dapp wants to perform a transaction and write to the blockchain, the user gets a secure interface to review the transaction, before approving or rejecting it.Because it adds functionality to the normal browser context, MetaMask requires the permission to read and write to any webpage.