# Hardhat

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Hardhat is a development environment for Ethereum software. It consists of different components for editing, compiling, debugging and deploying your smart contracts and dApps, all of which work together to create a complete development environment.

Hardhat Runner is the main component you interact with when using Hardhat. It's a flexible and extensible task runner that helps you manage and automate the recurring tasks inherent to developing smart contracts and dApps.

Hardhat Runner is designed around the concepts of **tasks** and **plugins**. Every time you're running Hardhat from the command-line, you're running a task. For example, `npx hardhat compile` runs the built-in `compile` task. Tasks can call other tasks, allowing complex workflows to be defined. Users and plugins can override existing tasks, making those workflows customizable and extendable.


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