My Solana Program Launch Checklist (Written the Day After I Actually Did It)

Three weeks from now I will open a terminal, ready to ship another program to mainnet-beta, and I will pause. What was the order again? Did the IDL go up before or after the authority transfer? Was there a flag that saved me from a stalled deploy last time? This checklist exists because I just walked the entire path devnet to mainnet, deploy to IDL to frontend to error handling, and I wrote it down while the details are still fresh. It is the document I wish I had on day one of that process. Run it top to bottom before every mainnet launch. Why a checklist at all? A Solana mainnet deploy is full of irreversible steps. The wallet that signs the deploy quietly becomes the program's upgrade authority. A buffer account left mid-deploy can strand real SOL. A plain anchor build after a verifiable build can produce a different hash and break verification later. None of these are complicated. They are all easy to forget under pressure. A checklist is not a crutch; it is the habit that lets you ship calmly instead of improvising each time. Phase 1: Pre-flight on devnet Do all of this while mistakes are still free. [ ] Every test passes against the final build. Run anchor build && cargo test --package <your-program> one last time. The binary you test must be the binary you ship. [ ] End-to-end run on devnet. Call every instruction through the actual frontend, not just the test suite. The frontend is a different caller than LiteSVM and will surface different failure modes. [ ] Produce a verifiable build. Run anchor build --verifiable . This pins the build environment so the on-chain bytecode can later be matched to your source code. Once you have this artifact, do not touch it with a plain anchor build or cargo build-sbf ; those can produce a different hash and silently break verification. [ ] Measure rent before you spend it. Run: solana rent $( wc -c < target/deploy/.so ) Your deploy wallet must hold this amount plus a margin for transaction fees. There is no airdrop on the