Is there any way to change hre provider when running script?

[congtanwkm]

Describe the feature

I'm running multiple hardhat nodes in different ports like: 0.0.0.0:8545, ...:8546, ...
My scripts is something like this and I use it in a nestjs project

import * as hre from 'hardhat';

async execute(port: number, from: string, to: string, txData: any) {
       // const provider = new hre.ethers.JsonRpcProvider(`http://0.0.00:${port}`);
       // change hre.ethers.provider => provider
        const sender = await hre.ethers.getImpersonatedSigner(from);
        const txData = {
          to: to,
          data: txData,
        };
    const tx = await sender.sendTransaction(txData);
}

hardhat.config.js

module.exports = {
  defaultNetwork: "localhost1",
  solidity: "0.8.19",
  networks: {
    localhost1: {
      url: "http://127.0.0.1:8545",
    },
    localhost2: {
      url: "http://127.0.0.1:8546",
    },
  },
}

I tried:

hre.ethers.provider = provider;

and the issue is:

Type 'JsonRpcProvider' is missing the following properties from type 'HardhatEthersProvider': _hardhatProvider, _networkName, _isHardhatNetworkCached, _latestBlockNumberPolled, and 25 more

My issue is: I can't change hre.ethers.provider to my custom provider, it always point to the default network came from hardhat config is localhost1. Is there anyway to set provider for hre?
I know we can change provider of sender by sender.connect(provider), but hre.ethers.getImpersonatedSigner still point to localhost1 and I will get error unknown account. I want to change provider inside hre.

Search terms

No response

[fvictorio]

No, that's not possible right now, and it won't be possible without a breaking change. The alternative is to manually create and use those ethers providers, as you mentioned, but that means not using any of the helpers under hre.ethers.

[fvictorio]

Tentatively closing because this already is in our roadmap for the next major version of Hardhat.