Deploying and Verifying

Deploying

Forge can deploy smart contracts to a given network with the forge create command.

Forge CLI can deploy only one contract at a time.

For deploying and verifying multiple smart contracts in one go, Forge’s Solidity scripting would be the more efficient approach.

To deploy a contract, you must provide a RPC URL (env: ETH_RPC_URL) and the private key of the account that will deploy the contract.

To deploy MyContract to a network:

$ forge create --rpc-url <your_rpc_url> --private-key <your_private_key> src/MyContract.sol:MyContract
compiling...
success.
Deployer: 0xa735b3c25f...
Deployed to: 0x4054415432...
Transaction hash: 0x6b4e0ff93a...

Solidity files may contain multiple contracts. :MyContract above specifies which contract to deploy from the src/MyContract.sol file.

Use the --constructor-args flag to pass arguments to the constructor:

// SPDX-License-Identifier: UNLICENSED
pragma solidity ^0.8.0;

import {ERC20} from "solmate/tokens/ERC20.sol";

contract MyToken is ERC20 {
    constructor(
        string memory name,
        string memory symbol,
        uint8 decimals,
        uint256 initialSupply
    ) ERC20(name, symbol, decimals) {
        _mint(msg.sender, initialSupply);
    }
}

Additionally, we can tell Forge to verify our contract on Etherscan, Sourcify or Blockscout, if the network is supported, by passing --verify.

$ forge create --rpc-url <your_rpc_url> \
    --constructor-args "ForgeUSD" "FUSD" 18 1000000000000000000000 \
    --private-key <your_private_key> \
    --etherscan-api-key <your_etherscan_api_key> \
    --verify \
    src/MyToken.sol:MyToken

Verifying a pre-existing contract

It is recommended to use the --verify flag with forge create to automatically verify the contract on explorer after a deployment. Note that for Etherscan ETHERSCAN_API_KEY must be set.

If you are verifying an already deployed contract, read on.

You can verify a contract on Etherscan, Sourcify, oklink or Blockscout with the forge verify-contract command.

You must provide:

the contract address
the contract name or the path to the contract <path>:<contractname>
your Etherscan API key (env: ETHERSCAN_API_KEY) (if verifying on Etherscan).

Moreover, you may need to provide:

the constructor arguments in the ABI-encoded format, if there are any
compiler version used for build, with 8 hex digits from the commit version prefix (the commit will usually not be a nightly build). It is auto-detected if not specified.
the number of optimizations, if the Solidity optimizer was activated. It is auto-detected if not specified.
the chain ID, if the contract is not on Ethereum Mainnet

Let’s say you want to verify MyToken (see above). You set the number of optimizations to 1 million, compiled it with v0.8.10, and deployed it, as shown above, to the Sepolia testnet (chain ID: 11155111). Note that --num-of-optimizations will default to 0 if not set on verification, while it defaults to 200 if not set on deployment, so make sure you pass --num-of-optimizations 200 if you left the default compilation settings.

Here’s how to verify it:

forge verify-contract \
    --chain-id 11155111 \
    --num-of-optimizations 1000000 \
    --watch \
    --constructor-args $(cast abi-encode "constructor(string,string,uint256,uint256)" "ForgeUSD" "FUSD" 18 1000000000000000000000) \
    --etherscan-api-key <your_etherscan_api_key> \
    --compiler-version v0.8.10+commit.fc410830 \
    <the_contract_address> \
    src/MyToken.sol:MyToken 

Submitted contract for verification:
                Response: `OK`
                GUID: `a6yrbjp5prvakia6bqp5qdacczyfhkyi5j1r6qbds1js41ak1a`
                url: https://sepolia.etherscan.io//address/0x6a54…3a4c#code

It is recommended to use the --watch flag along with verify-contract command in order to poll for the verification result.

If the --watch flag was not supplied, you can check the verification status with the forge verify-check command:

$ forge verify-check --chain-id 11155111 <GUID> <your_etherscan_api_key>
Contract successfully verified.

💡 Tip

Use Cast’s abi-encode to ABI-encode arguments.

In this example, we ran cast abi-encode "constructor(string,string,uint8,uint256)" "ForgeUSD" "FUSD" 18 1000000000000000000000 to ABI-encode the arguments.

Troubleshooting

`missing hex prefix ("0x") for hex string`

Make sure the private key string begins with 0x.

`EIP-1559 not activated`

EIP-1559 is not supported or not activated on the RPC server. Pass the --legacy flag to use legacy transactions instead of the EIP-1559 ones. If you do development in a local environment, you can use Hardhat instead of Ganache.

`Failed to parse tokens`

Make sure the passed arguments are of correct type.

`Signature error`

Make sure the private key is correct.

`Compiler version commit for verify`

If you want to check the exact commit you are running locally, try: ~/.svm/0.x.y/solc-0.x.y --version where x and y are major and minor version numbers respectively. The output of this will be something like:

solc, the solidity compiler commandline interface
Version: 0.8.12+commit.f00d7308.Darwin.appleclang

Note: You cannot just paste the entire string “0.8.12+commit.f00d7308.Darwin.appleclang” as the argument for the compiler-version. But you can use the 8 hex digits of the commit to look up exactly what you should copy and paste from compiler version.

Known Issues

Verifying Contracts With Ambiguous Import Paths

Forge passes source directories (src, lib, test etc) as --include-path arguments to the compiler. This means that given the following project tree

|- src
|-- folder
|--- Contract.sol
|--- IContract.sol

it is possible to import IContract inside the Contract.sol using folder/IContract.sol import path.

Etherscan is not able to recompile such sources. Consider changing the imports to use relative import path.

Verifying Contracts With No Bytecode Hash

Currently, it’s not possible to verify contracts on Etherscan with bytecode_hash set to none. Click here to learn more about how metadata hash is used for source code verification.

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