Best practice for connecting account to contract for staging test?

[RohanNero]

I am trying to write some staging tests and want to know the best practice for connecting your Ethereum account to the contract you are testing on the testnet.

I see that we often just used this:

deployer = (await getNamedAccounts()).deployer

But I don't fully understand what is actually going on in this line of code, if someone could explain I would greatly appreciate that!

[alymurtazamemon]

@RohanNero This is a feature provided by the hardhat plugin that you can give the name to your addresses so that you can easily access them and use them throughout the deploy scripts, tests, etc.

By defining this in a hardhat file, we are saying that whatever network we use, you should pick the addresses from that network and give them these names. Address at index 0 should be named as deployer and at index 1 should be named as player and like so you can do more as well.

namedAccounts: {
  deployer: {
    default: 0,
  },
  player: {
    default: 1,
  },
},

This way, when you will run your code on a local node (hardhat), hardhat will pick the addresses (hardhat 10 accounts) and assign it to these name variables. But on testnet/main, because we only have 1 main address, hardhat will assign that main address to the deployer name account and the player will be undefined.

The purpose of using addresses this way is to make it easy to use the addresses throughout the development journey, instead of using and remembering the long 48 bytes of addresses.

[krakxn]

deployer = (await getNamedAccounts()).deployer

Let's break this down piece-by-piece.

Firstly, getNamedAccounts() -- in your hardhat.config there is a namedAccounts object (emphasis on this, hope you are comfortable with objects), which essentially are "accounts" (for testing).

So, getNamedAccounts() is a getter function which returns the fields in namedAccounts (i.e. the entire object). So, now imagine that you have the entire namedAccounts object, from which we "extract" the deployer field by (await getNamedAccounts()).deployer -- this is how we interact with objects to "extract" data.

Ultimately, (await getNamedAccounts()).deployer evaluates to the extraction of deployer which we store in our deployer public variable.