How to enhance list of accounts for the Truffle tests to run against Ropsten testnet

Question

I am working on the my contracts testing scripts. But I want to run tests not on the local TestRPC or Ganache but in the Ropsten testnet. How can I predefine a list of accounts (private keys and addresses)?

Answer 1

You can use truffle-hdwallet-provider and provide it with mnemonic which has addresses funded with Ropsten Ethers.

var HDWalletProvider = require("truffle-hdwallet-provider");

var mnemonic = "mountains supernatural bird ...";

module.exports = {
  networks: {
    development: {
      host: "localhost",
      port: 8545,
      network_id: "*" // Match any network id
    },
    ropsten: {
      // must be a thunk, otherwise truffle commands may hang in CI
      provider: () =>
        new HDWalletProvider(mnemonic, "https://ropsten.infura.io/"),
      network_id: '3',
    }
  }
};

Answer 2

You can use HDWalletProvider to connect to a provider (infura or your local node) using a mnemonic phrase. In case you are using truffle, you can do it by seting you config to something like this:

...
    networks: {
    kovan: {
          provider: () => new HDWalletProvider(mnemonic, `https://kovan.infura.io/v3/${infuraKey}`),
          network_id: 3,       // Ropsten id
          ...
        }
      }
    ...

Attention that HDWalletProvider is deprecated. But I, personally, still use it often for testing environments.