Passing error messages from require down to the client in truffle-contract

[aleybovich]

• [ x] I've asked for help in the Truffle Gitter before filing this issue.

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Issue

There is no way of getting the actual error message when a require statements throws.

Steps to Reproduce

Have a contract that throws in require with an error message, like

require(1 == 2, "1 is not equal 2, dummy!")

Expected Behavior

The error message that the client receives includes the above error message

Actual Results

The client gets a generic VM Exception while processing transaction: revert message

Environment

Truffle v4.1.11 (core: 4.1.11)
Solidity v0.4.24 (solc-js)

Solidty docs talk about the error messages and how they are returned (at the bottom of the page): http://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/v0.4.24/control-structures.html

[cgewecke]

@aleybovich This has been implemented in Truffle V5, which we're planning to release in beta shortly. You can preview it by installing truffle at the @next tag and there is a draft release notes with detailed instructions open as a PR here. Checkout the web3 1.0 section for more detail about reason strings.

$ npm install truffle@next

There's another issue about this - #976 - would it be ok if we track it there?

[aleybovich]

@cgewecke - no problem, I'll close this one. Is V5 stable enough/feature complete to start using it?

[cgewecke]

@aleybovich I'm using it right now to write the tests for a package registry at EthPM here. And Colony has a PR open upgrading to it. That said I wouldn't describe it as "stable" and there are various small bugs still to work out.

Also contains significant breaking changes in truffle-contract - returning BN instead of BigNumber is the main one.

Obviously you're welcome to try it out - would love feedback and bug reports.