hardhat-ethers: how to get RPC URL of ethers.provider?

[aspiers]

When using hardhat-ethers, hre.ethers is extended, and in particular hre.ethers.provider is assigned to a provider proxy which (IIUC) wraps around the underlying Hardhat provider. However, the behaviour of this provider is not as transparent as it would be ideally. In particular, hre.ethers.provider.connection seems to always return { url: 'http://localhost:8545' } regardless of what RPC URL is actually being used.

I poked inside the underlying provider (hre.ethers.provider._hardhatProvider) and eventually managed to find the relevant connection info, but that was buried under an incredible number of layers of inheritance:

Ethers apparently already hides how to discover the RPC endpoint in use, so it would be great if hardhat-ethers didn't further compound the obfuscation ;-) Apologies in advance if I'm missing something.

[alcuadrado]

Hey @aspiers,

seems to always return { url: 'http://localhost:8545' }

This is unintentional and sounds like a bug.

My recommended way of doing it would be hre.network.config.url instead. Note that it will be undefined when using the in-process Hardhat Network.

[fvictorio]

We are tracking this here.