dev-mode.md

Development mode

Developer mode is intended to be used by users when developing and testing smart contracts. It allows hardhat-chai-matchers and other similar libraries to correctly assert revert messages of non-pure contract methods. It will also be expanded with special settings to speed up the local node.

Enabling

To enable dev mode start the Relay with the environment variable DEV_MODE set to true.

Rationale

In the example below contract.call() will make the following requests to the JSON RPC Relay: eth_chainId, eth_estimateGas, eth_sendRawTransaction, eth_getTransactionByHash

await expect(contract.call()).to.be.revertedWith("Some revert message");

The asserting method expects to catch an error from any of the called API endpoints. Normally eth_estimateGas throws the error if the contract call is about to revert, but that is currently not possible in the context of Hedera. Instead the error can be thrown by eth_getTransactionByHash after the transaction has gone through the consensus nodes. Since that is not the normal desired behaviour it is only enabled in this mode.