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halmos — Copilot Instructions

by a16z

AI Summary

Halmos is a symbolic execution tool for EVM smart contracts that integrates with Copilot to help developers write and verify property-based tests in Solidity. It enables security-focused developers to automatically find bugs and verify contract correctness using SMT solvers.

Install

# Download to .github/
mkdir -p .github
&& curl --retry 3 --retry-delay 2 --retry-all-errors -o .github/copilot-instructions.md "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/a16z/halmos/main/.github/copilot-instructions.md"

Run in your IDE terminal (bash). On Windows, use Git Bash, WSL, or your IDE's built-in terminal. If curl fails with an SSL error, your network may block raw.githubusercontent.com — try using a VPN or download the files directly from the source repo.

Description

A symbolic testing tool for EVM smart contracts

Project Context

Halmos is a symbolic execution tool for Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bytecode, with a focus on simplicity, performance and usability. It leverages foundry-style tests written in Solidity to let developers specify how to set up their test environment and what properties to check. It interfaces with Satisfyability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers like z3 to find bugs or rule them out.

run unit tests only (2-3s)

uv run pytest -vv -k "not long and not ffi and not regression"

run regression/e2e tests (2-3m)

uv run pytest -vv -k "not long and not ffi" `

Use Python ≥ 3.11

Use modern language features when they improve clarity or safety, but ensure every file runs on 3.11, the oldest supported target.

Quality Score

C

Acceptable

72/100

Standard Compliance72
Documentation Quality68
Usefulness79
Maintenance Signal40
Community Signal100
Scored Yesterday

GitHub Signals

Stars979
Forks98
Issues69
Updated7mo ago
View on GitHub

Trust & Transparency

Open Source — AGPL-3.0

Source code publicly auditable

Verified Open Source

Hosted on GitHub — publicly auditable

Maintained

Last commit 7mo ago

979 stars — Growing Community

98 forks

My Fox Den

Community Rating

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Works With

copilot