Skip to content
Tevm Docs

Actions

Overview

Tevm has an actions based api similar to viem’s actions api and following similar patterns. This is a higher level of abstraction than the lower level JSON-RPC api.

Public actions

MemoryClient comes with all viem public actions built in.

await memoryClient.getChainId();

ENS actions are supported but do not work unless forking a network with ENS support.

Error handling

By default Tevm clients will return a rejected promise when actions fail. Clients can optionally also return errors as values. This is very useful for handling errors in a typesafe way. All actions have a matching error in the tevm/error package.

To return errors as values pass in a throwOnFail: false option to the tevm action. Currently on tevm actions are supported and not other actions such as eth actions.

const {errors, data} = client.readContract({
  ...ERC20.read.balanceOf(address),
  throwOnFail: false,
})
  // the `name` property on errors is typesafe and can be used to determine the type of error
if (errors?.[0].name === 'FailedToEncodeArgs') {
  ...
}

TevmClient actions

TevmClient methods are the main recomended way to interact with Tevm. 🚧 means the procedure is still under construction

Note the call family of actions including TevmClient.call, TevmClient.contract, and TevmClient.script will execute in a sandbox and not modify the state. This behavior can be disabled via passing in a enableTransaction: true parameter.

Wallet Actions

MemoryClient supports viem wallet actions but does not come with them by default. This is because transactions can be created using tevm methods such as tevmCall and tevmContract.

If you wish to add walletActions to your tevm client you must add an account and the wallet decorator.

import { createMemoryClient } from "tevm";
import { generatePrivateKey, privateKeyToAccount } from "viem/accounts";
import { walletActions } from "viem/actions";


const memoryClient = createMemoryClient({
  account: privateKeyToAccount(generatePrivateKey()),
}).extend(walletActions);

Test actions

For compatability tevm supports using viem public actions. These test actions use anvil/hardhat methods such as `anvil_setBytecode. MemoryClient can do these actions with tevm actions. But testActions can be useful if you want to write code that works universally with Tevm hardhat and anvil.

import { testActions } from "viem";
import { createMemoryClient } from "tevm";


const memoryClient = createMemoryClient().extend(
  testActions({ mode: "anvil" }),
);

Http clients

If tevm is running in an http server using the @tevm/server package, any http client can be used to communicate with it including viem clients, and ethers clients. Tevm doesn’t export an http client itself and recomends you use viem as it’s apis all work with the in memory client.

Base Client and tree shakeable actions

While MemoryClient is suggested for most users, users trying to squeeze out bundle size wins such as 3rd party libraries may want to use the lower level BaseClient api.

Tevm supports tree shakeable actions similar to viem.

To make a minimal Tevm client use createBaseClient and import actions such as tevmSetAccount from @tevm/actions.

import { createBaseClient } from "tevm/base-client";
import { mainnet } from "tevm/common";
import { setAccountHandler } from "tevm/actions";


const tevm = createBaseClient({
  common: mainnet,
  fork: { transport: http("https://mainnet.optimism.io")({}) },
});


const tevmSetAccount = setAccountHandler(baseClient);


await tevmSetAccount({
  address: `0x${"01".repeat(20)}`,
  balance: 420n,
});

Viem actions with tree shakeable actions

To use viem tree shakeable actions you must build a client from scratch.

import { createBaseClient } from "tevm/base-client";
import { requestEip1193 } from "tevm/decorators";
import { mainnet } from "tevm/common";
import { tevmTransport } from "tevm";
import { createClient as createViemClient } from "viem";


// Create a minimal tevm client with only a EIP-1193 Request JSON-RPC function
export const mainnetTevm = createBaseClient({ common: mainnet }).extend(
  requestEip1193(),
);


// create a minimal viem client with tevm as it's transport
export const mainnetClient = createViemClient({
  // tevm commons can be used as viem chains
  chain: mainnet,
  transport: tevmTransport(mainnetTevm),
});

You can now use viem tree-shakeable actions

import { mainnetClient } from "./clients.js";
import { getBlock } from "viem/actions";


const block = await getBlock(mainnetClient, { number: 420n });

You can also use tevm tree shakable actions with the tevm base client.

import { mainnetTevm } from "./clients.js";
import { setAccountHandler } from "tevm/actions";


await setAccountHandler(mainnetTevm)({
  address: `0x${"01".repeat(20)}`,
  balance: 420n,
});

Lower level packages

For those wanting to dive deeper into tevms internal or squeeze out even smaller bundlers, in addition to BaseClient all the internal packages used to create base client are publically available on NPM. Notably:

  • @tevm/evm contains a very simple EVM interpreter used by tevm
  • @tevm/state provides a custom state manager used to implement forking
  • @tevm/blockchain contains the internal blockchain implementation
  • @tevm/txpool contains the mempool implementation

And more.

All these packages have generated reference docs