Chisel is a fast, utilitarian, and verbose solidity REPL. It is heavily inspired by the incredible work done in soli and solidity-shell!
Ever wanted to quickly test a small feature in solidity?
Perhaps to test how custom errors work, or how to write inline assembly?
Chisel is a fully-functional Solidity REPL, allowing you to write, execute, and debug Solidity directly in the command line.
Once you finish testing, Chisel even lets you export your code to a new solidity file!
In this sense, Chisel even serves as a Foundry script generator.
soli and solidity-shell both provide a great solidity REPL, achieving:
- Statement support
- Custom events, errors, functions, imports
- Inspecting variables
- Forking remote chains
- Session caching
Chisel aims to improve upon existing Solidity REPLs by integrating with foundry as well as offering additional functionality:
- More verbose variable / state inspection
- Improved error messages
- Foundry-style call traces
- In-depth environment configuration
- ... and many more future features!
Migrating from soli or solidity-shell
Migration from existing Solidity REPLs such as soli or solidity-shell is as
simple as installing Chisel via foundryup. For information on features, usage, and configuration, see the Usage section as well as the chisel manpage (man chisel or chisel --help).
To install chisel, simply run foundryup!
If you do not have foundryup installed, reference the Foundry installation guide.
⚒️ Chisel help
=============
General
!help | !h - Display all commands
!exec <command> [args] | !e <command> [args] - Execute a shell command and print the output
Session
!clear | !c - Clear current session source
!source | !so - Display the source code of the current session
!save [id] | !s [id] - Save the current session to cache
!load <id> | !l <id> - Load a previous session ID from cache
!list | !ls - List all cached sessions
!clearcache | !cc - Clear the chisel cache of all stored sessions
!export | !ex - Export the current session source to a script file
!fetch <addr> <name> | !fe <addr> <name> - Fetch the interface of a verified contract on Etherscan
Environment
!fork <url> | !f <url> - Fork an RPC for the current session. Supply 0 arguments to return to a local network
!traces | !t - Enable / disable traces for the current session
Debug
!memdump | !md - Dump the raw memory of the current state
!stackdump | !sd - Dump the raw stack of the current state
While chisel sessions are not persistent by default, they can be saved to the cache via the builtin save command from within the REPL.
Sessions can also be named by supplying a single argument to the save command, i.e. !save my_session.
$ chisel
➜ uint a = 1;
➜ uint b = a << 0x08;
➜ !save
Saved session to cache with ID = 0.
Chisel allows you to load a previous session from your history.
To view your history, you can run chisel list or !list. This will print a list of your previous sessions, identifiable by their index.
You can also run chisel view <id> or !view <id> to view the contents of a specific session.
To load a session, run chisel load <id> or use the !load <id> where <id> is a valid session index (eg 2 in the example below).
$ chisel list
⚒️ Chisel Sessions
"2022-10-27 14:46:29" - chisel-0.json
"2022-10-27 14:46:29" - chisel-1.json
$ chisel view 1
// SPDX-License-Identifier: UNLICENSED
pragma solidity 0.8.17;
contract REPL {
event KeccakEvent(bytes32 hash);
function run() public {
emit KeccakEvent(keccak256(abi.encode("Hello, world!")));
}
}
$ chisel load 1
➜ ...
To clear Chisel's cache (stored in ~/.foundry/cache/chisel), use the chisel clear-cache or !clearcache command.
➜ !clearcache
Cleared chisel cache!
By default, traces will only be shown if an input causes the call to the REPL contract to revert. To turn traces on
regardless of the call result, use the !traces command or pass in a verbosity option of any level (-v<vvvv>) to
the chisel binary.
➜ uint a
➜ contract Test {
function get() external view returns (uint) {
return 256;
}
}
➜ Test t = new Test()
➜ !traces
Successfully enabled traces!
➜ a = t.get()
Traces:
[69808] 0xBd770416a3345F91E4B34576cb804a576fa48EB1::run()
├─ [36687] → new <Unknown>@0xf4D9599aFd90B5038b18e3B551Bc21a97ed21c37
│ └─ ← 183 bytes of code
├─ [315] 0xf4D9599aFd90B5038b18e3B551Bc21a97ed21c37::get() [staticcall]
│ └─ ← 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000100
└─ ← ()
➜ a
Type: uint
├ Hex: 0x100
└ Decimal: 256
To fork a network within your chisel session, use the !fork <rpc-url> command or supply a --fork-url <url> flag
to the chisel binary. The !fork command also accepts aliases from the [rpc_endpoints] section of your foundry.toml
if chisel was launched in the root of a foundry project (ex. !fork mainnet), as well as interpolated environment variables
(ex. !fork https://eth-mainnet.g.alchemy.com/v2/${ALCHEMY_KEY}).
To fetch an interface of a verified contract on Etherscan, use the !fetch / !f command.
Note At the moment, only contracts that are deployed and verified on mainnet can be fetched. Support for other networks with Etherscan explorers coming soon.
➜ !fetch 0xC02aaA39b223FE8D0A0e5C4F27eAD9083C756Cc2 IWETH
Added 0xC02aaA39b223FE8D0A0e5C4F27eAD9083C756Cc2's interface to source as `IWETH`
Shell commands can be executed within Chisel with the !exec / !e command.
➜ !e ls
anvil
binder
Cargo.lock
Cargo.toml
cast
chisel
cli
common
config
CONTRIBUTING.md
Dockerfile
docs
evm
fmt
forge
foundryup
LICENSE-APACHE
LICENSE-MIT
README.md
rustfmt.toml
target
testdata
ui
utils