hardhat-ethers.SignerWithAddress.signMessage broken on hardhat network

[cytadela8]

Summary

Calling signMessage on a signer returned by ethers.getSigners() when using hardhat network results with following error:

     MethodNotFoundError: Method personal_sign not found
      at HardhatNetworkProvider._send (node_modules/hardhat/src/internal/hardhat-network/provider/provider.ts:208:11)
      at processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:96:5)
      at async HardhatNetworkProvider.request (node_modules/hardhat/src/internal/hardhat-network/provider/provider.ts:108:18)
      at async EthersProviderWrapper.send (node_modules/@nomiclabs/hardhat-ethers/src/internal/ethers-provider-wrapper.ts:13:20)

Code

Test producing the above error:

import { expect } from "chai";
import { ethers } from "hardhat";

describe("Test signing", function () {
  it("sign", async function () {
    const [account] = await ethers.getSigners();
    console.log(await account.signMessage("test"));
  });
});

Full repository with the test failing: https://github.com/cytadela8/hardhat-issue-sign-failed/

Steps to reproduce

$ npm install hardhat
$ npx hardhat  # choose advanced project with typescript
$ vim test/index.ts   # Create a test as above
$ npx hardhat test  # Test fails with exception as above

[cytadela8]

This issue seems to be some new-ish regression. .signMessage worked for me ~month ago. It started failing after reinstalling node dependencies.

[fvictorio]

Thanks for reporting this @cytadela8. This seems to be a change introduced in ethers@5.5.0, see this issue. For the time being, a workaround is to downgrade to 5.4.x, although I understand that's not ideal. Alternatively, you can use this helper:

function sign(address: string, data: string) {
  return hre.network.provider.send(
    "eth_sign",
    [address, ethers.utils.hexlify(ethers.utils.toUtf8Bytes('foo'))]
  )
}

// ...

const [signer] = await ethers.getSigners()
const signed = await sign(signer.address, 'test')

I guess we should implement the personal_sign RPC method to fix this.

[alcuadrado]

Thanks for reporting this, @cytadela8. I'll close this issue, as I just opened one more specific.