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Contract Configurations

Paima templates leverage Hardhat for deploying and managing EVM contracts.

Typically, deploying your contracts involve two steps:

npm run chain:start # start a chain on the local network
npm run chain:deploy # deploy contracts to the local network (see `hardhat.config.ts` for network names)

Deployments are done leveraging Hardhat Ignition. You can modify the scripts to deploy all the EVM contracts for your app by modifying ./contracts/evm/ignition/modules/deploy and you can modify the core Hardhat configs in hardhat.config.ts

Paima comes with multiple contracts for the basic use-cases. You can find all the EVM contracts that come with Paima in the @paima/evm-contracts NPM package.

Deploying to a testnet or mainnet​

By default, Hardhat will spin up a local EVM chain for you to interact with (learn more here). If you want to use a real network (testnet or mainnet), the following steps will help you get set up:

  1. Make sure you have the correct network setup in your hardhat.config.ts
  2. Ensure that you have a good RPC provider for the network (free RPC providers will typically rate limit and enforce other limitations making them too limited for Paima)
  3. Fund a (non-hardware wallet) EVM account on your target chain with enough to cover the cost of deploying a contract (this is your deployment account).
  4. Export the private key of the account from your wallet software (MetaMask supports this in the "Account details" section).
  5. Set the deployment account private key to an environment variable called DEPLOYER_PRIVATE_KEY and export it. For example, in Bash, run export DEPLOYER_PRIVATE_KEY=... with your private key (without an 0x prefix) instead of the ellipsis.
  6. Make sure you've set any parameters for your deployment in ./contracts/evm/ignition/parameters.json
  7. Deploy the contract by running npm run chain:deploy
  8. Hardhat will proceed forward with doing all of the steps required to get the contract compiled and deployed, using the wallet you specified the DEPLOYER_PRIVATE_KEY for.
  9. Once finished you will get a summary of the deployment which includes the address of the newly deployed contract

Adding New Contracts​

To add new contracts to your project and have them available from your Hardhat Ignition deployment script, you have two options:

Contracts you want to use as-is​

If you want to use a contract as-is, you can add it to your compilation process by modifying your hardhat.config.ts

const config: HardhatUserConfig = {
  dependencyCompiler: {
    paths: [
      // add your contract here. Example ↓
      // '@paima/evm-contracts/contracts/PaimaL2Contract.sol',
    ],
  },
};

Contracts with custom logic​

If you want to add your own custom contract for your game, you place it in ./contracts/evm/solidity.

More generally speaking, you can modify the place where new contracts are loaded by modifying your hardhat.config.ts

const config: HardhatUserConfig = {
  paths: {
    sources: './contracts/evm/solidity', // ← here
  },
}

Modifying the Paima Built-In Contract​

You can extend the functionality of the built-in contracts using Solidity inheritance, as for example the L2 contract can be found in @paima/evm-contracts/contracts/PaimaL2Contract.sol. However, for cases where that is not sufficient, Paima allows you to extract a copy of all the built-in contracts by running ./paima-engine contracts which emits a contracts folder.

Interacting with Contracts​

You can interact with the contracts you've deployed using the hardhat-interact plugin using npx hardhat --network localhost interact

Finding Your Deployed Contracts​

You can find the deployment address of the contract anytime in ./contracts/evm/ignition/deployments/chain-XXX/deployed_addresses.json