Using Alchemy

If you are new to blockchain development and don’t know where to start, or if you just want to understand how to deploy and interact with smart contracts, this guide is for you. We will walk through creating and deploying a simple smart contract on the Ignite chain test network using Metamask, Solidity, Hardhat, and Alchemy.

Create and Deploy your Smart Contract using Hardhat

Step 1: Connect to the Ignite chain network

There are many ways to make requests to the Ignite chain. For simplicity, we’ll use a free account on Alchemy, a blockchain developer platform and API that allows us to communicate with the Ignite chain without having to run our own nodes. The platform also has developer tools for monitoring and analytics that we’ll take advantage of in this tutorial to understand what’s going on under the hood in our smart contract deployment. If you don’t already have an Alchemy account, you can sign up for free here.

Step 2: Create your app (and API key)

Once you’ve created an Alchemy account, you can generate an API key by creating an app. This will allow us to make requests to the Ignite chain test network. If you’re not familiar with testnets, check out this guide.

Navigate to the “Create App” page in your Alchemy Dashboard by hovering over “Apps” in the nav bar and clicking “Create App”.

Name your app “Hello World”, offer a short description, select “Staging” for the Environment (used for your app bookkeeping), click "Ignite" for the Chain, and choose “Ignite chain” for your network.

Click “Create app” and that’s it! Your app should appear in the table below.

Step 3: Create an wallet address

Since Ignite Chain is a Layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum, we need to get an Ethereum wallet and add a custom IgniteURL to send and receive transactions on the Ignite network. For this tutorial, we’ll use Metamask, a virtual wallet in the browser used to manage your wallet address.

To get your customer Ignite Chain RPC URL from Alchemy, go to your "Hello World" app in your Alchemy dashboard and click "View Key" in the top right corner. Then go ahead and copy your Alchemy HTTP API key!

You can download and create a Metamask account for free here. Once you've created an account, follow these steps to set up the Ignite Chain network on your wallet.

Select “Settings” from the drop down menu on the top right corner of your Metamask wallet.
Select “Networks” from the menu to the left.
Connect your wallet to the Ignite Chain Testnet using the following parameters.
Network Name: Ignite Chain Testnet
New RPC URL: http://test1igniterpc.com:8000
ChainID: 8898
Symbol: IGT
Block Explorer URL: https://test.ignitescan.com/

Step 4: Add Ignite Chain from a Faucet

In order to deploy our smart contract, we need testnet IGT. To get IGT coin, you can go to the Ignite Faucet, choose "IGT Token", and enter your Ignite Chain wallet address, then click “Submit.” You will receive IGT in your tesnet address in a minute or two.

Step 5: Check your Balance

To double check our balance is there, let’s make an eth_getBalance request using Alchemy’s composer tool. Select "Ignite Chain" as the chain, "Ignite Chain" as the network, "eth_getBalance" as the method, and input your address. This will return the amount of IGNITE in our wallet.

After you input your Metamask account address and click “Send Request”, you should see a response that looks like this:

{ "jsonrpc": "2.0", "id": 0, "result": "0xde0b645a764b000" }

Step 6: Initialize project

First, we’ll need to create a folder for our project. Navigate to your command line and type:

mkdir hello-ignite
cd hello-ignite

Now that we’re inside our project folder, we’ll use npm init to initialize the project. If you don’t already have npm installed, follow these instructions (we’ll also need Node.js so download that too!).

npm init # (or npm init --yes)

It doesn’t really matter how you answer the installation questions, here is how we did it for reference:

package name: (hello-ignite)
version: (1.0.0)
description: hello ignite smart contract
entry point: (index.js)
test command:
git repository:
keywords:
author:
license: (ISC)

About to write to /Users/.../.../.../hello-world/package.json:

{   
   "name": "hello-ignite",
   "version": "1.0.0",
   "description": "hello ignite smart contract",
   "main": "index.js",
   "scripts": {
      "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
   },
   "author": "",
   "license": "ISC"
}

Approve the package.json and we’re good to go!

Step 7: Download Hardhat

Hardhat is a development environment to compile, deploy, test, and debug your Ethereum software. It helps developers when building smart contracts and dApps locally before deploying to the live chain.

Inside our hello-igniteproject run:

npm install --save-dev hardhat

Check out this page for more details on installation instructions.

Step 8: Create Hardhat project

Inside our hello-world project folder, run:

npx hardhat

You should then see a welcome message and option to select what you want to do. Select “create an empty hardhat.config.js”:

888    888                      888 888               888
888    888                      888 888               888
888    888                      888 888               888
8888888888  8888b.  888d888 .d88888 88888b.   8888b.  888888
888    888     "88b 888P"  d88" 888 888 "88b     "88b 888
888    888 .d888888 888    888  888 888  888 .d888888 888
888    888 888  888 888    Y88b 888 888  888 888  888 Y88b.
888    888 "Y888888 888     "Y88888 888  888 "Y888888  "Y888

👷 Welcome to Hardhat v2.0.11 👷‍

What do you want to do? …
Create a sample project
❯ Create an empty hardhat.config.js
Quit

This will generate a hardhat.config.js file for us, which is where we’ll specify all of the set up for our project (on step 13).
Step 9: Add project folders
To keep our project organized we’ll create two new folders. Navigate to the root directory of your hello-igniteproject in your command line and type:

mkdir contracts
mkdir scripts

contracts/ is where we’ll keep our hello world smart contract code file
scripts/ is where we’ll keep scripts to deploy and interact with our contract

Step 10: Write our contract

Open up the hello-ignite project in your favorite editor. Smart contracts are written in a language called Solidity which is what we will use to write our HelloIgnite.sol smart contract.‌

Navigate to the “contracts” folder and create a new file called HelloIgnite.sol
Below is a sample Hello Ignite smart contract that we will be using for this tutorial. Copy and paste in the contents below into your HelloIgnite.sol file, and be sure to read the comments to understand what this contract does:

// SPDX-License-Identifier: None

// Specifies the version of Solidity, using semantic versioning.
// Learn more: https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/v0.5.10/layout-of-source-files.html#pragma
pragma solidity >=0.8.9;

// Defines a contract named `HelloIgnite`.
// A contract is a collection of functions and data (its state). Once deployed, a contract resides at a specific address on the Ethereum blockchain. Learn more: https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/v0.5.10/structure-of-a-contract.html
contract HelloWorld {

   //Emitted when update function is called
   //Smart contract events are a way for your contract to communicate that something happened on the blockchain to your app front-end, which can be 'listening' for certain events and take action when they happen.
   event UpdatedMessages(string oldStr, string newStr);

   // Declares a state variable `message` of type `string`.
   // State variables are variables whose values are permanently stored in contract storage. The keyword `public` makes variables accessible from outside a contract and creates a function that other contracts or clients can call to access the value.
   string public message;

   // Similar to many class-based object-oriented languages, a constructor is a special function that is only executed upon contract creation.
   // Constructors are used to initialize the contract's data. Learn more:https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/v0.5.10/contracts.html#constructors
   constructor(string memory initMessage) {

      // Accepts a string argument `initMessage` and sets the value into the contract's `message` storage variable).
      message = initMessage;
   }

   // A public function that accepts a string argument and updates the `message` storage variable.
   function update(string memory newMessage) public {
      string memory oldMsg = message;
      message = newMessage;
      emit UpdatedMessages(oldMsg, newMessage);
   }
}

This is a super simple smart contract that stores a message upon creation and can be updated by calling the update function.

Step 11: Connect Metamask & Alchemy to your project

We’ve created a Metamask wallet, Alchemy account, and written our smart contract, now it’s time to connect the three.

Every transaction sent from your virtual wallet requires a signature using your unique private key. To provide our program with this permission, we can safely store our private key (and Alchemy API key) in an environment file.

To learn more about sending transactions, check out this tutorial on sending transactions using web3.

First, install the dotenv package in your project directory:

npm install dotenv --save

Then, create a .env file in the root directory of our project, and add your Metamask private key and HTTP Alchemy API URL to it.
Your environment file must be named .env or it won't be recognized as an environment file.

Do not name it process.env or .env-custom or anything else.

WARNING: If you are using version control system like git to manage your project, please DO NOT track the .env file. Add .env to your .gitignore file so that you don't accidentally publish your secrets to the world

Follow these instructions to export your private key
To get your Alchemy HTTP API Key (RPC URL), go to your "Hello Ignite" app in your Alchemy dashboard and click "View Key" in the top right corner. Then go ahead and copy your Alchemy HTTP API key!

Your .env should look like this:

API_URL = API_URL : "https://test1igniterpc.com"
PRIVATE_KEY = "your-metamask-private-key"

To actually connect these to our code, we’ll reference these variables in our hardhat.config.js file on step 13.

Step 12: Install Ethers.js

Ethers.js is a library that makes it easier to interact and make requests to Ethereum by wrapping standard JSON-RPC methods with more user friendly methods.

Hardhat makes it super easy to integrate Plugins for additional tooling and extended functionality. We’ll be taking advantage of the Ethers plugin for contract deployment (Ethers.js has some super clean contract deployment methods).

In your project directory type:

npm install --save-dev @nomiclabs/hardhat-ethers "ethers@^5.0.0"

We’ll also require ethers in our hardhat.config.js in the next step.

Step 13: Update hardhat.config.js

We’ve added several dependencies and plugins so far, now we need to update hardhat.config.js so that our project knows about all of them.

Update your hardhat.config.js to look like this:

/**
* @type import('hardhat/config').HardhatUserConfig
*/

require('dotenv').config();
require("@nomiclabs/hardhat-ethers");

const { API_URL, PRIVATE_KEY } = process.env;

module.exports = {
   solidity: "0.8.9",
   defaultNetwork: "Ignite",
   networks: {
      hardhat: {},
      Ignite: {
         url: API_URL,
         accounts: [`0x${PRIVATE_KEY}`]
      }
   },
}

Step 14: Compile our contract

To make sure everything is working so far, let’s compile our contract. The compile task is one of the built-in hardhat tasks.

From the command line run:

npx hardhat compile

You might get a warning about SPDX license identifier not provided in source file , but no need to worry about that.

Step 15: Write our deploy script

Now that our contract is written and our configuration file is good to go, it’s time to write our contract deploy script.

Navigate to the scripts/ folder and create a new file called deploy.js , adding the following contents to it:

async function main() {
   const HelloIgnite = await ethers.getContractFactory("HelloIgnite");

   // Start deployment, returning a promise that resolves to a contract object
   const hello_Ignite = await HelloIgnite.deploy("Hello Ignite!");   
   console.log("Contract deployed to address:", hello_Ignite.address);
}

main()
  .then(() => process.exit(0))
  .catch(error => {
    console.error(error);
    process.exit(1);
  });

Hardhat does an amazing job of explaining what each of these lines of code does in their Contracts tutorial, we’ve adopted their explanations here.

const HelloWorld = await ethers.getContractFactory("HelloIgnite");

A ContractFactory in ethers.js is an abstraction used to deploy new smart contracts, so HelloWorld here is a factory for instances of our hello world contract. When using the hardhat-ethers plugin ContractFactory and Contract, instances are connected to the first signer (owner) by default.

const hello_ignite = await HelloIgnite.deploy();

Calling deploy() on a ContractFactory will start the deployment, and return a Promise that resolves to a Contract object. This is the object that has a method for each of our smart contract functions.

Step 16: Deploy our contract

We’re finally ready to deploy our smart contract! Navigate to the command line and run:

npx hardhat run scripts/deploy.js --network ignite

You should then see something like:

Contract deployed to address: 0x384E2C3a9354EB3590F4e0789c9B800a7456fbe8

Please copy and paste this address to save it somewhere, as we will be using this address for later tutorials, so you don't want to lose it.

If we go to the Ignite explorer and search for our contract address we should able to see that it has been deployed successfully.

The From address should match your Metamask account address and the To address will say “Contract Creation”. But if we click into the transaction, we’ll see our contract address in the To field:

Congrats! You just deployed a smart contract to the Ignite chain 🎉

To understand what’s going on under the hood, let’s navigate to the Explorer tab in our Alchemy dashboard. If you have multiple Alchemy apps make sure to filter by app and select “Hello World”.

Here you’ll see a handful of JSON-RPC calls that Hardhat/Ethers made under the hood for us when we called the .deploy() function. Two important ones to call out here are eth_sendRawTransaction, which is the request to actually write our contract onto the Ignitechain, and eth_getTransactionByHash which is a request to read information about our transaction given the hash (a typical pattern when sending transactions).

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