Hardhat network resetting repeatedly

Question

I'm trying to test out some functionality using the AAVE sandbox network, which is a hardhat forked network that has their protocol built in for testing purposes. I am able to deploy my contract to the network and interact with it, however, the state resets every time I run a new test. Also, I am printing the address of the contract each time I run the test and the address changes every time and is different that the address in the contract's JSON object in deployments. For clarity, here is how I am accessing the contract in my test code.

accounts = await ethers.getSigners()
              deployer = accounts[0]
              user = accounts[1]
              await deployments.fixture(["all"])
              yieldFundContract = await ethers.getContract("YieldFund")
              yieldFund = yieldFundContract.connect(deployer)

I'm wondering if this issue is happening due to some property of a hardhat network, but I figured it would be able to keep track of state? Furthermore, this code works as expected when deployed to a testnet and tested in the exact same way.

Answer 1

that's a pretty normal state of affairs. the hardhat network only lasts as long as your script is running and you start afresh each run. That's generally not a bad thing for unit tests and suchlike.

If you want the network state to persist for a while, like with ganache or similar, you'd have to run it up in a separate process and interact with that. something like npx hardhat node