Hardhat is an Ethereum development environment from Nomic Foundation that can be used for compiling, testing and deploying our Solidity smart contracts. When implementing tests, Hardhat makes use of JavaScript (or TypeScript) scripts as testing instructions. This makes Hardhat one of the most commonly used tools for testing and deploying smart contracts, as many developers already know JavaScript or could easily learn it.

To use smart contracts written in Solidity our code must be compiled to bytecode and deployed to a network that uses the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) for computation. This can be off putting for Solidity newcomers as there may be an assumption that we need to deploy our contract to something like the Ethereum network, which can be costly, irreversible and daunting to newcomers.