These are steps for creating and deploying a smart contract and minting assets. I followed these guides for the most part to the letter. Some exceptions:

• I used my own NFT name, akadenianft and symbol AKADENIA.
• I used yarn instead of NPM.
• I copied the presets from the node_modules directory to my project directory per the documented procedure, but I didn't like that for obvious reasons. I had to diff the two directories later to see what changes the compile step applied to build/contracts. It might make it easier to see what is going on if the preset were imported: https://docs.openzeppelin.com/contracts/3.x/api/presets#ERC721PresetMinterPauserAutoId
• I used a moralis speedy node instead of the URL in the example truffle-config.json (but only after I deployed the contract and minted NFTs). The moralis speedy node seems to have better availability.
• To interact with the contract on testnet I used truffle console --network testnet

Project setup and initial development

Follow the procedure described in at the following URL:

https://docs.binance.org/smart-chain/developer/ERC721.html

My 2_deploy.js seemed to have a bug and I didn't know what the third argument to deploy was so I wound up making a 3_deploy.js that looks like this:

// migrations/2_deploy.js
// SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT
const ERC721PresetMinterPauserAutoId = artifacts.require(
  "ERC721PresetMinterPauserAutoId"
);

module.exports = function(deployer) {
  deployer.deploy(
    ERC721PresetMinterPauserAutoId,
    "akadenianft",
    "AKADENIA",
    "http://my-json-server.typicode.com/huangsuyu/nft/tokens/"
  );
};

The arguments to deploy are as follows:

is the contract object, the second is the name of the smart contract,

1. contract object (ERC721PresetMinterPauserAutoId)
2. Smart contract name (akadenianft)
3. Smart contract symbol (AKADENIA)
4. Base URI for tokens (This will have the token ID appended when calling tokenURI (example: http://my-json-server.typicode.com/huangsuyu/nft/tokens/1)

Without the trailing / the token URIs were invalid; for example, ending in tokens1 instead of tokens/1.

After I deployed the smart contract to the local network using truffle develop I had to switch over to the following guide to deploy to BSC testnet:

https://docs.binance.org/smart-chain/developer/deploy/truffle.html

To complete this procedure you will first need to setup a wallet with an account connected to BSC testnet. I can't remember how that was setup. I used MetaMask. When you create your account you will be given a “Secret Recovery Phrase,” be sure to store that somewhere safe. This is also referred to as mnemonic in the procedure. I just created a plain text .secret file with the recovery phrase as the content.

.secret will be imported into truffle-config.json you should just be able to uncomment those lines of code. You will also need to add a network for bsc testnet. I called it testnet just like the documentation. I changed to node URL to the one that can be retrieved from https://admin.moralis.io/speedyNodes. It seems to be more reliable.

Last thing, use truffle console --network testnet to mint NFTs instead of truffle develop.