Integrating with Hardhat

It's possible to have your Foundry project work alongside Hardhat. This assumes that you have a working Foundry project and want to add Hardhat. It also assumes familiarity with Hardhat.

Why does this not work out of the box?

Hardhat by default expects libraries to be installed in node_modules, the default folder for all NodeJS dependencies. Foundry expects them to be in lib. Of course we can configure Foundry but not easily to the directory structure of node_modules.

For this reason, the recommended setup is to use hardhat-preprocessor. Hardhat-preprocessor is, as the name suggests, a Hardhat plugin which allows us to preprocess our contracts before they are run through the Solidity compiler.

We use this to modify the import directives in our Solidity files to resolve absolute paths to the libraries based on the Foundry remappings.txt file before Hardhat attempts to compile them. This of course just happens in memory so your actual Solidity files are never changed. Now, Hardhat is happy to comply and compiles using the libraries you installed with Foundry.

Just show me the example repo!

Enjoy!

If you want to adapt this to a Foundry project you already have or learn how it works, read below:

Instructions

Inside your Foundry project working directory:

npm init - Setup your project details as usual.
npm install --save-dev hardhat - Install Hardhat.
npx hardhat - Setup your Hardhat project as you see fit in the same directory.
forge remappings > remappings.txt - You will need to re-run this every time you modify libraries in Foundry.

Now you need to make the following changes to your Hardhat project. The following assumes a TypeScript setup:

npm install --save-dev hardhat-preprocessor - Details on hardhat-preprocessor
Add import "hardhat-preprocessor"; to your hardhat.config.ts file.
Ensure the following function is present (you can add it to your hardhat.config.ts file or somewhere else and import it - also ensure import fs from "fs"; is present in the file it is added):

function getRemappings() {
  return fs
    .readFileSync("remappings.txt", "utf8")
    .split("\n")
    .filter(Boolean) // remove empty lines
    .map((line) => line.trim().split("="));
}

Thanks to @DrakeEvansV1 and @colinnielsen for this snippet

Add the following to your exported HardhatUserConfig object:

...
preprocess: {
  eachLine: (hre) => ({
    transform: (line: string) => {
      if (line.match(/^\s*import /i)) {
        for (const [from, to] of getRemappings()) {
          if (line.includes(from)) {
            line = line.replace(from, to);
            break;
          }
        }
      }
      return line;
    },
  }),
},
paths: {
  sources: "./src",
  cache: "./cache_hardhat",
},
...

Now, Hardhat should work well with Foundry. You can run Foundry tests or Hardhat tests / scripts and have access to your contracts.

Use Foundry in an existing Hardhat project

Suppose that you already have a Hardhat project with some dependencies such as @OpenZeppelin/contracts in directory node_modules/.

You can use Foundry test in this project in 4 steps.

Before we start, let's take a look at the directories:

Contracts are in contracts
Hardhat unit test is in test, and we will put Foundry test files in test/foundry
Hardhat puts its cache in cache, and we will put Foundry cache in forge-cache

4 steps to add Foundry test

Copy lib/forge-std from a newly-created empty Foundry project to this Hardhat project directory. A note: you can also run forge init --force to init a Foundry project in this non-empty directory and remove unneeded directories created by Foundry init.
Copy foundry.toml configuration to this Hardhat project directory and change src, out, test, cache_path in it:

[profile.default]
src = 'contracts'
out = 'out'
libs = ['node_modules', 'lib']
test = 'test/foundry'
cache_path  = 'forge-cache'

# See more config options https://book.getfoundry.sh/reference/config.html

Create a remappings.txt to make Foundry project work well with VS Code Solidity extension:

ds-test/=lib/forge-std/lib/ds-test/src/
forge-std/=lib/forge-std/src/

See more on remappings.txt and VS Code Solidity extension: Remapping dependencies, Integrating with VSCode

Make a sub-directory test/foundry and write Foundry tests in it.

Let's put the sample test file Contract.t.sol in this directory and run Foundry test

forge test

Now, Foundry test works in this existing Hardhat project. As the Hardhat project is not touched and it can work as before.

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