ethers

What is ethers?

The ethers npm package is a library that provides a set of tools to interact with the Ethereum blockchain. It allows users to connect to the Ethereum network, manage wallets and keys, interact with smart contracts, and perform various other blockchain-related operations.

What are ethers's main functionalities?

Connecting to Ethereum Network

This code sample demonstrates how to connect to the Ethereum network using ethers with an Infura provider.

const { ethers } = require('ethers');
const provider = new ethers.providers.JsonRpcProvider('https://mainnet.infura.io/v3/YOUR_INFURA_API_KEY');

Wallet Management

This code sample shows how to create a new wallet from a private key and connect it to an Ethereum provider.

const { ethers } = require('ethers');
const wallet = new ethers.Wallet('YOUR_PRIVATE_KEY');
const connectedWallet = wallet.connect(provider);

Interacting with Smart Contracts

This code sample illustrates how to interact with a smart contract by creating a contract instance and calling one of its functions.

const { ethers } = require('ethers');
const abi = [...] // Contract ABI
const contractAddress = '0x...'; // Contract address
const contract = new ethers.Contract(contractAddress, abi, provider);
const value = await contract.someFunction();

Sending Transactions

This code sample demonstrates how to send a transaction to the Ethereum network using a wallet instance.

const { ethers } = require('ethers');
const tx = {
  to: '0x...',
  value: ethers.utils.parseEther('1.0'),
  gasLimit: 21000,
  gasPrice: ethers.utils.parseUnits('10', 'gwei')
};
const sendPromise = wallet.sendTransaction(tx);

Querying Blockchain Data

This code sample shows how to query blockchain data, such as retrieving the latest block number and details of a specific block.

const { ethers } = require('ethers');
const blockNumber = await provider.getBlockNumber();
const block = await provider.getBlock(blockNumber);

Other packages similar to ethers

truffle-contract

Truffle Contract is part of the Truffle Suite and is designed to provide a more comfortable abstraction for interacting with Ethereum smart contracts. It is often used in combination with other Truffle tools for development, testing, and deployment. While it offers similar contract interaction capabilities, it is more tightly integrated with the Truffle development environment compared to ethers.

drizzle

Drizzle is a collection of front-end libraries that make writing dApp front-ends easier and more predictable. It is part of the Truffle Suite and is designed to work with a Redux store. Drizzle provides reactive contract data fetching and transaction processing, which can be more convenient for dApp development. However, it is more opinionated and specific to front-end development compared to ethers, which is more general-purpose.

README

The Ethers Project

---

A complete, compact and simple library for Ethereum and ilk, written in TypeScript.

Features

• Keep your private keys in your client, safe and sound
• Import and export JSON wallets (Geth, Parity and crowdsale)
• Import and export BIP 39 mnemonic phrases (12 word backup phrases) and HD Wallets (English as well as Czech, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Traditional Chinese)
• Meta-classes create JavaScript objects from any contract ABI, including ABIv2 and Human-Readable ABI
• Connect to Ethereum nodes over JSON-RPC, INFURA, Etherscan, Alchemy, Ankr or MetaMask
• ENS names are first-class citizens; they can be used anywhere an Ethereum addresses can be used
• Tiny (~120kb compressed; 400kb uncompressed)
• Tree-shaking focused; include only what you need during bundling
• Complete functionality for all your Ethereum desires
• Extensive documentation
• Large collection of test cases which are maintained and added to
• Fully written in TypeScript, with strict types for security
• MIT License (including ALL dependencies); completely open source to do with as you please

Keep Updated

For the latest news and advisories, please follow the @ethersproject on Twitter (low-traffic, non-marketing, important information only) as well as watch this GitHub project.

For the latest changes, see the CHANGELOG.

Summaries

• September 2022
• June 2022
• March 2022
• December 2021
• September 2021
• May 2021
• March 2021
• December 2020

Installing

NodeJS

/home/ricmoo/some_project> npm install ethers

Browser (ESM)

The bundled library is available in the ./dist/ folder in this repo.

<script type="module">
    import { ethers } from "./dist/ethers.min.js";
</script>

Documentation

Browse the documentation online:

• Getting Started
• Full API Documentation
• Various Ethereum Articles

Providers

Ethers works closely with an ever-growing list of third-party providers to ensure getting started is quick and easy, by providing default keys to each service.

These built-in keys mean you can use ethers.getDefaultProvider() and start developing right away.

However, the API keys provided to ethers are also shared and are intentionally throttled to encourage developers to eventually get their own keys, which unlock many other features, such as faster responses, more capacity, analytics and other features like archival data.

When you are ready to sign up and start using for your own keys, please check out the Provider API Keys in the documentation.

A special thanks to these services for providing community resources:

• Ankr
• QuickNode
• Etherscan
• INFURA
• Alchemy
• Pocket

Extension Packages

The ethers package only includes the most common and most core functionality to interact with Ethereum. There are many other packages designed to further enhance the functionality and experience.

• Hardware Wallets (@TODO)

License

MIT License (including all dependencies).