Understanding Hardhat development and unit testing

Hardhat is built using Node.js and was created by Nomic Labs. Hardhat first launched in 2018. As one of the most popular Solidity development environments, which is similar to Truffle, Hardhat helps developers develop, test, compile, deploy, and debug smart contracts and DApps.

The following subsections will discuss Hardhat Runner, Hardhat Network, and the Hardhat project structure. Let’s take a look at Hardhat Runner first.

Hardhat Runner

Hardhat Runner is the main component for Hardhat deployment operations and is designed based on the concepts of tasks and plugins. Let’s take a look at Hardhat Runner.

Hardhat Runner provides the CLI commands for developer interactions with Hardhat. A task is executed while running Hardhat from the command line. Most of Hardhat’s functionality comes from plugins, and developers can choose the plugins they like. The following table shows a list of some popular Hardhat...