Introduction

       I have some practical experience with Solidity already, and was recommended by one of my colleague to try to supplement my knowledge with the Hardhat framework. I checked it out and would like to try it out and create a basic working smart contract. I will be following the official document of Hardhat found here.

Hardhat Concepts

Hardhat is composed of the following concepts.

  • Tasks: There are commands that can be ran on the terminal, some are provided by Hardhat upon install (e.g. npx hardhat compile). To find out the list of tasks use the following command:
npx hardhat help [task]
  • Plugins: Tools that can be integrated to Hardhat. Examples of these are ’ethers.js’ and ‘waffle’.

Steps

Prerequisite

  • NodeJS 16.15.1
  • NPM 8.11.0(Should have been installed with NodeJS)

Github Setup

  1. I have created a new repository on my Github account, it can be found here.
  2. Opened Git bash, then used the following commands.
  • Cloned the repository to my local machine.
git clone https://github.com/tiukenywil11/hardhat-demo.git
  • Navigated to the project.
cd hardhat-demo
  • Opened project via VS Code.
code .

Environment Setup

  1. Open a terminal on VSCode using the following keyboard shortcut CTRL + SHIFT + ~.
  2. Install Hardhat dependencies using NPM (Node Package Manager).
  • Initialize a node project.
npm init
  • (Optional) Fill up the details after the command
  • Install Hardhat to the dev environment (Inside project directory only).
npm install --save-dev hardhat
  1. Create a Hardhat config file.
  • Run the following command to run hardhat on terminal.
npx hardhat
  • Choose the option ‘Create an empty hardhat.config.js’. This will create a ‘hardhat.config.js’ on the same directory as your ‘package.json’.

Installing plugins

  1. Install the following plugins.
  • Ethers.js: Used to help interact with the Ethereum blockchain.
  • Waffle: Used to build smart contracts.
npm install --save-dev @nomiclabs/hardhat-ethers ethers @nomiclabs/hardhat-waffle ethereum-waffle chai
  1. Add Installed dependency on hardhat.config.js, this should be added on first line of the file. (Adding ‘Ethers.js’ is not necessary, because ‘Waffle’ already calls ‘Ethers.js’)
require("@nomiclabs/hardhat-waffle");

Saving changes to Github.

  1. Commited changes to Github repository.
git add .
git commit -m "Part 1: Environment setup, and base hardhat config"
git push

Outro

       So with this, we have already set up the environment for Hardhat, and created and installed the basic dependencies of a new Hardhat project. The repository can be found here. This blog will be resumed in parts, due to my busy schedule, but we stopped at the following section for this post Hardhat: Creating a new Hardhat project.

Read More:
Next:
Hard Hat Basics: Part 2