Deploy a Smart Contract Using Hardhat
Last updated
Last updated
In this tutorial, you'll be guided through setting up a Hardhat project and deploying a Hedera smart contract to the Hedera Testnet using the Hashio JSON-RPC instance.
Hardhat is a development environment for Ethereum smart contracts. It consists of different components for editing, compiling, debugging, and deploying your smart contracts and dApps, all working together to create a complete development environment. By the end of this tutorial, you'll have learned how to deploy smart contracts using Hardhat on the Hedera Testnet**.**
Basic understanding of smart contracts.
Basic understanding of Node.js or Javascript.
Basic understanding of the .
Basic understanding of .
To make the setup process simple, you'll use a pre-configured Hardhat project from the hedera-hardhat-example-project
.
Open a terminal window and navigate to your preferred directory where your Hardhat project will live. Run the following command to clone the repo and install dependencies to your local machine:
The dotenv
package is used to manage environment variables in a separate .env
file, which is loaded at runtime. This helps protect sensitive information like your private keys and API secrets, but it's still best practice to add .env
to your .gitignore
to prevent you from pushing your credentials to GitHub.
In this step, you will update and configure the Hardhat configuration file that defines tasks, stores Hedera account private key information, and Hashio Testnet RPC URL. First, rename the .env.example
file to .env
. and update the .env
and hardhat.config.js
files with the following code.
The .env
file defines environment variables used in the Hardhat configuration file. The TESTNET_OPERATOR_PRIVATE_KEY
variable contains the ECDSA Hex Encoded Private Key for the Hedera Testnet account used in the testnet
network Hardhat configuration.
The hardhat.config.js
file defines tasks for Hardhat, including show-balance
, transfer-hbars
, deploy-contract
, contract-view-call
, and contract-call
. It exports a configuration object that includes the Solidity version and settings, default network, and network settings for the testnet
network.
The url
property is set to the TESTNET_ENDPOINT
environment variable, and accounts
to an array containing the testnet private key imported from the .env
file.
The contracts/
folder contains the source file for the Greeter smart contract.
Let's review the Greeter.sol
smart contract in the hedera-example-hardhat-project/contracts
folder. At the top of the file, the SPDX-License-Identifier
defines the license, in this case, the MIT license. The pragma solidity ^0.8.9;
line specifies the Solidity compiler version to use. These two lines are crucial for proper licensing and compatibility.
The scripts/
folder contains the automation scripts for the test file. This project contains 4 scripts.
The scripts/
folder contains test scripts for locally testing a smart contract before deploying it. Please read the comments to help you understand the code and its purpose:
Calls the setGreeting
function from the Greeter contract and sets the greeter message to "Greeter."\
Run the following command in your terminal to run the hedera-hardhat-example-project/test/rpc.js
test file on the Hedera testnet.
Tests should pass with "4 passing" returned to the console. Otherwise, an error message will appear indicating the issue.
Lastly, run the following command to deploy the contract to the Hedera Testnet:
The Network Explorer will return the information about the contract created and deployed to the Hedera Testnet. The "EVM Address" field is the public address of the contract that was returned to you in your terminal. The terminal returned the public address with the "0x" hex encoding appended to the public address. You will also notice a contract ID in 0.0.contractNumber
(0.0.3478001
) format. This is the contract ID used to reference the contract entity in the Hedera Network.
Note: At the top of the explorer page, remember to switch the network to TESTNET before you search for the contract.
But first, in order to deploy the contract to the Hedera Testnet, you will need to get a testnet account and key. To get a testnet account, create an ECDSA account using the . Once you have your ECDSA account and HEX encoded private key, add the private key to the TESTNET_OPERATOR_PRIVATE_KEY
variable in the .env
file.
The Hedera Testnet account allows you to interact with our and pay for the transaction fees. Visit the to create your Hedera Testnet account and follow the instructions.
The TESTNET_ENDPOINT
variable contains the Testnet endpoint URL. This is the JSON-RPC instance that will submit the transactions to the Hedera test network to test, create and deploy your smart contract.
In this step, you'll look at the descriptions of the Hardhat project contents. For more information regarding Hardhat projects, check out the . If you do not need to review the project contents you can skip to "."
NOTE: The pragma solidity line must match the version of Solidity defined in the of your hardhat.config.js
file.
The test/
folder contains the test files for the project.
The rpc.js
file is located in the test
folder of the hedera-example-hardhat-project
project and references the Hardhat that are defined in the hardhat.config file. When the command npx hardhat test
is run, the program executes the rpc.js
file.
A file that stores your environment variables like your accounts, private keys, and references to Hedera network ().
The Hardhat project configuration file. This file includes information about the Hedera network RPC URLs, accounts, and tasks defined ().
Now that you have your project set up and configured, let's deploy the Greeter.sol
smart contract to the Hedera Testnet using . Hashio is an instance of the hosted by and provides convenient access to the Hedera network for transactions and data querying. You can use any JSON-RPC instance supported by the community.
You've successfully deployed your contract to the Hedera Testnet! You can view the contract you deployed by searching the smart contract public address in a supported . For this example, we will use the Network Explorer. Copy and paste your deployed Greeter.sol
public contract address into the HashScan search bar.
Writer: Krystal, Technical Writer
Editor: Simi, Sr. Software Manager
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