What is the difference betweeen getSigners() eth accounts and the eth account in .env?

Question

I am currently learning the usage of the Hardhat deployment environment and I have some questions with regards to getSigners()

I understand that getSigners() is an abstraction of an eth acc to be used to sign messages and tx and send signed tx to the eth network

So in calling eg. const accounts = await ethers.getSigners() We will be returned a list of eth acc in the node we are connected to

This is the part which I am confused about:

What is the difference between the account we often save in our .env file (the one with the private key to our accounts when we set up hardhat.config.js) and accounts from getSigners()? Why isn't it the eth account in our .env responsible for signing tx?

Hope that you guys can help me out here:)

Answer 1

Your .env file is an option for defining secret information - such as account private keys. getSigners returns the list of available signers, which may come from multiple sources.

The tricky part is where do the signers come from? It really depends on your setup and used network. For example, in the hardhat (default) network the signers is based on a static list of private keys, meant for only testing purposes. I guess you can override these signers to be something from your .env file, but usually there's no need.

For other networks the signers depend on your setup - maybe you read them from .env or somewhere else.