Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Hardhat.

Hardhat is the development environment NZRT uses for compiling, testing, and deploying Solidity smart contracts to the Base network. If you’re working on blockchain development here, Hardhat is your main toolkit, and this episode will walk you through how it’s set up and used.

Let’s start with installation. The setup code block shows you a sequence of commands to get a new project going. You start by creating a new folder for your contract project and moving into it. Then you initialise a Node package, which sets up your project’s dependency management. After that you install Hardhat itself as a development dependency. Once that’s done, you run Hardhat’s init command and choose the JavaScript project option when it prompts you. Finally, you install two more packages — the Hardhat Toolbox, which bundles together a set of useful plugins, and the OpenZeppelin Contracts library, which gives you access to audited, battle-tested contract templates. That’s your full starting point — five steps and you’re ready to go.

Now let’s talk about how a Hardhat project is organised. The project structure block lays out five key locations. First, there’s a folder called contracts, which is where all your Solidity source files live. Second, there’s a scripts folder — this is where your deployment scripts go. Third, a test folder holds your test files, written using the Mocha and Chai testing frameworks. Fourth, a file called hardhat.config.js is your central configuration file — it handles network settings and plugins. And fifth, a dot-env file is where you store your private keys and API keys. That last one is critical — you never commit that file to version control. Keep it local and keep it secret.

The next section covers the Hardhat config file set up specifically for the Base network, and this is where things get a bit more detailed. The config file shown in the wiki does a few things. It pulls in the Hardhat Toolbox and the dotenv library, which lets you read those environment variables from your dot-env file. It then defines your Solidity compiler version as 0.8.20. After that it sets up two networks. The first is Base Sepolia, which is the testnet — it uses a chain ID of 84532 and pulls its RPC URL and your wallet’s private key from environment variables. The second is Base Mainnet, the live network, which uses chain ID 8453 and works the same way. On top of that, the config sets up contract verification through Basescan — again for both networks. For Base Sepolia, it points to the Sepolia-specific Basescan API and browser URLs. For Base Mainnet, it points to the standard Basescan URLs. Both read your Basescan API key from an environment variable. This setup means you can switch between testnet and mainnet deployments just by changing one flag in your command, without ever hardcoding sensitive credentials into your config.

Speaking of commands, let’s go through what’s in the common commands section. There are six you’ll reach for regularly. The first is the compile command, which processes your Solidity files and checks them for errors. The second is the test command, which runs your full test suite. The third starts a local network on your machine, useful for rapid development and iteration without touching any real or test network. The fourth and fifth are your deployment commands — you run the same deploy script but point it at either Base Sepolia or Base Mainnet by passing the network name as a flag. And the sixth is the verify command, which submits your deployed contract’s source code to Basescan so that anyone can inspect it. When you run verify, you pass the network, the deployed contract address, and any constructor arguments your contract was initialised with.

One thing worth noting from the wiki — the full NZRT-specific deployment guide lives in the ITE Blockchain section under Hardhat. If you’re doing an actual production deployment and want the NZRT-specific steps and conventions, that’s where to go. The wiki page you’re listening to now is the overview and reference — the deeper guide covers the full process end to end.

Related topics in the wiki include Alchemy, which is the RPC provider you saw referenced in the config file, and the Contract Deployment guide which covers the broader deployment workflow.

To summarise: Hardhat gives you a complete local environment for Solidity development. You install it with npm, organise your work across contracts, scripts, and test folders, configure your networks in the config file using environment variables for security, and then use a small set of commands to compile, test, deploy, and verify your contracts on Base.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.