Overview of Anvil

Anvil is a local testnet node shipped with Foundry. You can use it for testing your contracts from frontends or for interacting over RPC.

Anvil is part of the Foundry suite and is installed alongside forge, cast, and chisel. If you haven't installed Foundry yet, see Foundry installation.

Note: If you have an older version of Foundry installed, you'll need to re-install foundryup in order for Anvil to be downloaded.

How to use Anvil

To use Anvil, simply type anvil. You should see a list of accounts and private keys available for use, as well as the address and port that the node is listening on.

Anvil is highly configurable. You can run anvil -h to see all the configuration options.

Some basic options are:

#  Number of dev accounts to generate and configure. [default: 10]
anvil -a, --accounts <ACCOUNTS>

# The EVM hardfork to use. [default: latest]
anvil --hardfork <HARDFORK>

# Port number to listen on. [default: 8545]
anvil  -p, --port <PORT>

📚 Reference

See the anvil Reference for in depth information on Anvil and its capabilities.