Aragon OSX — Creating a Project for Working with Aragon

Introduction

Aragon provides a powerful ecosystem for building decentralized organizations and governance applications. But before working with DAOs, proposals, permissions, and smart contracts, you need a properly configured development environment. In this first part of the series, we'll create the foundation of an Aragon project, install the required dependencies, and look at how the main components fit together.

By the end, you'll have a clean starting point that can be extended with more advanced Aragon functionality.

What Is Aragon OSx?

Aragon OSx is a modular framework designed for building and managing decentralized autonomous organizations. Instead of forcing every organization into the same governance model, it provides developers with building blocks that can be combined and extended for different use cases.

At its core, the ecosystem revolves around DAOs, permissions, plugins, and smart contracts. Understanding how these pieces interact is essential before moving on to more complex functionality.

For developers, this means being able to build governance systems around the actual requirements of a product rather than adapting the product to a rigid governance structure.

Installing the Dependencies

Once the basic project is running, we can add the libraries required to communicate with Aragon and the underlying blockchain network.

There are generally three responsibilities we need to cover:

Before You Start

Before creating the project, make sure your development environment has the basic tools required for modern Web3 development.

You should be comfortable with JavaScript or TypeScript and have a basic understanding of Ethereum, wallets, smart contracts, and asynchronous application logic.

You'll also need a Node.js development environment, a package manager, Git, and access to an Ethereum-compatible wallet for testing.

Creating the Project

The first step is creating a clean application that will serve as the foundation for your Aragon integration.

At this stage, keep the architecture simple. It's tempting to introduce abstractions early, but doing so before understanding how your application interacts with Aragon usually creates unnecessary complexity.

A good starting structure separates the user interface, blockchain integration layer, configuration, and reusable utilities.

This will become particularly useful later when we introduce DAO interactions and governance functionality.