What is different between Aptos devnet and testnet?

Question

I'm starting to build a dapp on Aptos and I notice that there are two development networks, devnet and testnet. What are the differences between these two?

Answer 1

Update - 2022-01-26: Previously the testnet faucet required the user to complete a captcha. This is no longer true, the faucets of both networks work similarly, so that section has been removed from the answer.

Release cadence

Devnet is generally released every week. Testnet is generally released every two weeks, after devnet.

This means devnet gets new features sooner and more frequently.

Persistence

With devnet, the chain is reset every release. All data is wiped, including any deployed modules, accounts, etc. and the chain restarts from genesis with a new chain ID. If you're building on devnet this means you must redeploy your Move modules and accounts every week.

Testnet is never wiped, similar to mainnet.

Faucet access

On both devnet and testnet you can create new accounts and get new APT easily by either:

• Using the "Faucet" button in your wallet (e.g. in Petra).
• Using the FaucetClient in the SDK.
• Using the aptos CLI:

aptos account fund-with-faucet --account 0xd0f523c9e73e6f3d68c16ae883a9febc616e484c4998a72d8899a1009e5a89d6

• Hitting the faucet directly:

curl -X POST 'https://faucet.devnet.aptoslabs.com/mint?amount=100&address=0xd0f523c9e73e6f3d68c16ae883a9febc616e484c4998a72d8899a1009e5a89d6'

Which should you use?

Generally speaking testnet is a friendlier developer experience because you don't need to keep redeploying your code / recreating accounts. For standard development the amount of APT the testnet faucets give you should be more than sufficient.

Devnet is good for rapid experimentation where you don't care about data persistence or if you're running tests that require programmatic access to APT.