Advice on how to handle the "getContractFactory" augmentations

[PaulRBerg]

My hardhat-packager plugin builds upon @typechain/hardhat to prepare the artifacts and the typechain folders for registry deployment. What it does is to delete all files unrelated to an allowlist of contracts, specified by the user.

I want to add support for TypeChain factories, but I noticed that you aggregate the augmentations for the getContractFactory function in one file called hardhat.d.ts. This is problematic for me because I would have to edit this file and remove all augmentations that don't refer to the allowlisted contracts.

On my end, I can think of two solutions:

1. Do not include the hardhat.d.ts file, but include the bespoke factories from the factories folder.
2. Include the hardhat.d.ts file as it is, with the downside of the user seeing augmentations for contracts not part of the deployed package (e.g. test contracts).

On your end, I can think of two other solutions:

1. Let us select what contracts we'd like to generate types for.
2. Move the augmentation for the getContractFactory function in the bespoke contract declaration file.

Re 2nd solution, taking my solidity-template as an example, you would add something like this in the typechain/Greeter.d.ts file:

import { ethers } from "ethers";
import {
  HardhatEthersHelpers as HardhatEthersHelpersBase,
} from "@nomiclabs/hardhat-ethers/types";
import { Greeter__factory } from "./factories/Greeter__factory";

declare module "hardhat/types/runtime" {
  interface HardhatEthersHelpers extends HardhatEthersHelpersBase {
    getContractFactory(
      name: "Greeter",
      signerOrOptions?: ethers.Signer | FactoryOptions
    ): Promise<Greeter__factory>;
  }
}

[PaulRBerg]

Update: I ended up implementing my 1st proposed solution in hardhat-packager@1.1.0.

[krzkaczor]

Interesting problem. I wonder what if there would be an optional glob pattern for typechain plugin ie. rather than generate typings for all artifacts just generate it to these files. Would this help in integration?

[PaulRBerg]

Oh this would be fantastic!!