Outputs "Unexpected error" for expected errors

[rimrakhimov]

Version of Hardhat

2.22.3

What happened?

Hardhat outputs

An unexpected error occurred during the verification process.
Please report this issue to the Hardhat team.

for ContractVerificationInvalidStatusCodeError and ContractVerificationMissingBytecodeError errors.

For example, if ContractVerificationMissingBytecodeError error has been thrown, hardhat outputs:

An unexpected error occurred during the verification process.
Please report this issue to the Hardhat team.
Error Details: Failed to send contract verification request.
Endpoint URL: https://api-hardhat.etherscan.io/api
Reason: The Etherscan API responded that the address 0x5FbDB2315678afecb367f032d93F642f64180aa3 does not have bytecode.
This can happen if the contract was recently deployed and this fact hasn't propagated to the backend yet.
Try waiting for a minute before verifying your contract. If you are invoking this from a script,
try to wait for five confirmations of your contract deployment transaction before running the verification subtask.

But I believe they are actually expected and should be caught in those lines.

Solution

That happens because those errors are inherited from classes which have setPrototypeOf methods in their constructors. E.g.,

hardhat/packages/hardhat-core/src/internal/core/errors.ts

Line 181 in 3573f69

Object.setPrototypeOf(this, NomicLabsHardhatPluginError.prototype);

. If all such assignments removed, those errors are caught successfully.

I don't know why those assignments have been added, though, and whether removing them will have no undesired effects

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The same considerations apply to ContractStatusPollingInvalidStatusCodeError and ContractStatusPollingResponseNotOkError in those lines. The corresponding test case.

Minimal reproduction steps

To reproduce, for ContractVerificationMissingBytecodeError you may update the regexp in this test case (e.g., "someprefixThe Etherscan API responded that the address ..."), so you can get the actual error message hardhat returns

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