forge script --watch is not watching anything

[dalechyn]

Component

Forge

Have you ensured that all of these are up to date?

• Foundry
• Foundryup

What version of Foundry are you on?

forge 0.2.0 (28b2ae6 2023-03-04T00:10:50.272293Z)

What command(s) is the bug in?

forg escript

Operating System

macOS (Intel)

Describe the bug

Greetings folks!
Have a specific use-case where I need to watch-on-file changes and redeploy the script to the anvil (trying to make recompile on-watch along with @wagmi/cli hooks work), but it just looks like the --watch mode does ... nothing?

2023-03-04.21.26.30.mp4

[mds1]

What if you explicitly specify the script dir, e.g. forge script -w script/? I'm not sure if watch mode is not supported for forge script, or if the script dir is just not watched by default

[dalechyn]

What if you explicitly specify the script dir, e.g. forge script -w script/? I'm not sure if watch mode is not supported for forge script, or if the script dir is just not watched by default

Same behavior.

Since it's stayed in the docs I wanted to leverage on that. Thus it's either about removing the --watch mode from docs (maybe it implements the etherscan verifying feature instead of the actual watch?), or actually implementing the watch

[mds1]

I don't think there's much value in having a watch mode for scripts, because in many cases it won't work anyway (e.g. create2 deployments), so my preference would be to fix the docs/CLI help

[dalechyn]

@mds1 Why won't it work sorry? Wouldn't you pass the salt via parameter for a factory anyway?

I do understand however that shipping such a feature could be a hard task.

But from the perspective of DX, I would find it really useful to build a custom script that watches the changes in the smart contracts, and automatically deploys the contracts locally with @wagmi/cli parsing the broadcasted contracts to populate in the config to have the addresses set automatically in hooks, which could be a no-env-variables solution for local dApp development.

Since @wagmi/cli config is a js/ts script I could synchronously read the deployment result, but that won't do much if the scripts are not re-deployed on the fly.

Let's reference back to this issue if similar feature requests are opened in the future to be considered needed.

I'm good with changing the docs for now.

[mds1]

Why won't it work sorry? Wouldn't you pass the salt via parameter for a factory anyway?

If you pass a salt to the script, in watch mode it's always going to use the same salt, meaning it will deploy to the same address, and since there's already code there from the first deploy, the deploy would fail. So you'd have to restart anvil in between / clear the code from that address

But otherwise sounds good, I'll leave this issue open until CLI help/docs are updated

[mattsse]

the only reason --watch is in there is because of code debt, some argument types used by build are reused by script. but --watch is not supported in script.

But from the perspective of DX, I would find it really useful to build a custom script that watches the changes in the smart contracts, and automatically deploys the contracts locally with @wagmi/cli parsing the broadcasted contracts to populate in the config to have the addresses set automatically in hooks, which could be a no-env-variables solution for local dApp development.

this sounds like a valid usecase.
however as @mds1 mentioned, --watch+deploy is probably problematic

[dalechyn]

and since there's already code there from the first deploy

Yes, it would be possible only if forge script --watch could roll back the anvil state to the block before the deployment of the contracts, thus making two pieces of software tied up altogether.

But isn't a local development node running when forge test is called? Can forge script --watch become Anvil-in-Foundry feature too?

[mds1]

Unlike hardhat, forge test does not make RPC queries to a local development node, the VM is part of the forge process

[dalechyn]

Well, then it's certain that the --help docs for forge script has to be modified and that's fair.

[mds1]

Just reviewed the above: summary seems to be that the action here is to fix the forge script -h output so the watch flags aren't shown. More generally we might want to take a pass through the all output there, I suspect there's other fields erroneously shown