Recommended way to compile contracts with custom settings on the fly

[mds1]

I'm trying to write a method that takes a contract address as input, fetches the source code from Etherscan, and uses the returned source code + compiler settings to re-compile the source code with the storageLayout flag (and possibly other solc flags) enabled.

A sample response from this Etherscan endpoint can be found by querying https://api.etherscan.io/api?module=contract&action=getsourcecode&address=0xc0Da02939E1441F497fd74F78cE7Decb17B66529&apikey=yourEtherscanApiKey (make sure to fill in your API key)

The source code can be flattened into a single string, and import statements and duplicate pragmas can then be removed. From there, you can save the source code to a temporary file in the contracts directory, then the final step is to run the compile task with the settings returned from Etherscan plus any additional settings.

That final step is what I'd like to discuss here. @fvictorio mentioned in Discord that there's currently no way to do something like await run('compile', myCustomSolcSettingsObject), so I wanted to get thoughts on the best way to do this. It seems I should be able to import the Compiler class from here and use that to compile with custom settings, so that's what I'm planning to try next, but would love to hear any other thoughts here!

[alcuadrado]

Hey @mds1,

Something that you can do is using the subtasks of compile, creating a CompilationJob and compiling that. You'd be reimplementing some parts of the compilation pipeline, but those would be rather small.

[mds1]

Thanks @alcuadrado! Do you mind expanding on what you mean a bit?

Are you saying to write my own compilation task that effectively re-implements the TASK_COMPILE_SOLIDITY task, and just allow the solcConfig on L1348 to be specified by an input parameter to this task?

That feels like a good chunk of code to copy/paste, so I feel like I may be misunderstanding something

[alcuadrado]

Now that I think about this again, you should be able to override TASK_COMPILE_SOLIDITY_GET_COMPILATION_JOBS and add your own custom CompilationJobs on top of the default ones, without having to copy/paste code