Unit testing and deploying smart contracts with Forge

In December 2021, Paradigm Lab's CTO Georgios introduced Foundry, a new framework for Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-based smart contract development, which quickly became the industry standard due to its efficiency and ease of use compared to existing frameworks like Hardhat and Truffle. Foundry, implemented in Rust, is significantly faster and does not require developers to know web development-oriented languages such as JavaScript or TypeScript, making it more accessible for Solidity developers focused on backend work. The framework includes features like call stack traces, an interactive debugger, and inbuilt fuzzing, and is accompanied by two CLI tools: Forge for testing and deploying smart contracts, and Cast for interacting with deployed contracts. The article provides a detailed guide on setting up a Foundry project, creating and testing a simple faucet contract using Forge, and deploying the contract to the Kovan testnet, highlighting Foundry's robust capabilities in smart contract development and testing.