In brownie there's a very handy syntax to avoid deploying multiple times the same contract on-chain, while developing and iterating fast:
MyContract.deploy()
# somewhere else, sometime later:
MyContract[-1] # last known address of YourContract deployed
In this way it's easy to check whether there's a version of your contract already deployed, and if there is you just re-use it instead of going through deploying again. That's particularly useful for Mocks, for instance, as they hardly change at all and it's just a waste of time (and gas… even if on testnet) to re-deploy them every run.
Is there a similar behaviour in Hardhat? Or I need to manually keep track of contract addresses as they're deployed, and re-instantiate the objects in later runs?
const contractAddress = "0x..."; // do I have to manually keep track of this address?
const myContract = await ethers.getContractAt("MyContract", contractAddress);
Best Answer
Turns out that the answer is a Hardhat plugin,
hardhat-deploy, available here.