Viem best practices

Use when building or reviewing TypeScript Ethereum integrations with viem.

Mental model

• viem is a low-level, typed, stateless Ethereum interface built around clients, transports, actions, and typed utilities.
• Keep client setup, transport choice, account ownership, and contract interaction explicit.
• Prefer composable viem helpers over broad wrappers that obscure what RPC calls and signing behavior are actually happening.

Clients and transports

• Choose the correct client type for the job: public client for reads, wallet client for signing and writes, test client for local-chain control.
• Make transport selection explicit: http, webSocket, or custom EIP-1193 transport depending on the environment.
• Keep authenticated RPC provider configuration centralized and avoid scattering raw URLs across the codebase.

Accounts and signing