Hands-On Hardhat - Part-1 (Setting up Environment)

Hi everyone I hope that you’re doing good. Today I’m gonna explain Hardhat in briefly. What is Hardhat and why we need it?

So What is It?

Firstly, according to their documentation; Hardhat is a development environment to compile, deploy, test, and debug your Ethereum software. It helps developers manage and automate the recurring tasks that are inherent to the process of building smart contracts and dApps, as well as easily introducing more functionality around this workflow. This means compiling, running and testing smart contracts at the very core. Hardhat comes built-in with Hardhat Network, a local Ethereum network designed for development. It’s functionality focuses around Solidity debugging, featuring stack traces, console.log()and explicit error messages when transactions fail. And Hardhat is written in JavaScript and Node.js.

Why we need it?
Before production we write our codes and we need to test them locally. Because we can make mistake in our own local environment and we don’t want users to see our mistakes and to prevent wrong operations, transactions or related stuffs in production. And especially if we work with Ethereum or other cryptos ecosystems we don’t wanna deploy our smart contracts straight to mainnet because these kinds of deployments are so much expensive we have to pay gas to run these transactions. So without further ado Hardhat helps us to set up a local ethereum development environment.

Okay, lads and gents let’s not beat around the bush and start to set up our environment.

Note: Before starting I assume that you’ve installed node.js

Open your terminal and create a project directory;

mkdir hands-on-hardhat

and go into it,

cd hands-on-hardhat

and then writes these command lines to init and install hardhat;

npm init --yes
npm install --save-dev hardhat

In the same directory where you installed Hardhat and run:

npx hardhat

at there, the command line ask you to choice an option and I wanna point out a few things here;

These options totally depend on your requirements.
For example an empty hardhat option is a very basic project sample if you need more libraries, plugins or you use Typescript later, you have to add them manually. Like @nomiclabs/hardhat-waffle , [ethereum-waffle](https://www.npmjs.com/package/ethereum-waffle), chai , @nomiclabs/hardhat-ethers , ethers , [@openzeppelin/contracts](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@openzeppelin/contracts)
Because, they'll allow us to interact with Ethereum and to test our contracts.

So, let me show you when you choose one of these options what will your project structure look like?

Empty

Basic

Advanced

Advanced-ts

In this tutorial I’m gonna choose an advanced sample because this tutorial will be a series so later on, I will need some libraries and I don’t want to waste my time adding other libraries.

After choosing an advanced sample my terminal is asking to me “Do you want to add a .gitignore?“

I’m gonna press enter and it will add .gitignore automatically for me.

After pressing enter look carefully at the terminal the libraries that I mentioned before all starting to download.

To make sure everything is working correctly run this command:

npx hardhat test

If you get an error like this;

write this line to the command line;

export NODE_OPTIONS=--openssl-legacy-provider

for furthermore details please check out this

well, seems everything is perfect!

The next thing that I wanted to show is the different tasks so now that we've let hardhat initialize our application and create that directory structure. If we run npx hardhat we'll see a list of different tasks or commands that we can run.

For example accounts task provides us a list of ethereum accounts that are available or compile task if we want to compile all the smart contracts in our project we use this task.
Maybe we need a local node for a local node we use node task.

To demonstrate I’m just running the accounts task for now;

So as you see It provided to us 20 ethereum test accounts.

after all installation is finished, just write this command line in the same directory;

code .

This command line will open your project automatically in VSCode.
If the command line doesn’t work like this;

Please check out this solution.

Well, congratulations you've just finished the project setup, take a breathe and wait for part 2, please.

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