What exactly is the providers object? (Lesson 7)

[atenger]

I'm at around 11:30 in Lesson 7 and we are setting up tests for FundMe.sol. Patrick is explaining that we use provider to get to the getBalance function but that it doesn't matter whether we used fundMe or Ethers to access provider.

 const startingFundMeBalance = await fundMe.provider.getBalance(
                fundMe.address
            )

The question I have is what exactly is provider, and if Patrick wasn't there to tell me, how would I know that provider is available with my FundMe contract?

[krakxn]

"The question I have is what exactly is provider" -- Answered here: Link to Docs

"if Patrick wasn't there to tell me, how would I know that provider is available with my FundMe contract?" -- You can always ask for help here throughout the course. Of course, to be industry-ready would require you to go through docs by yourself, at that point you will mostly be by yourself besides your team.

[ArkX69]

Hey how long you've been following this course?
Bcz i am also doing it and stunned by your progress, i just need some tips how to got that far!

[omeguy]

When did you start the course ?

[Stark-Code]

"if Patrick wasn't there to tell me, how would I know that provider is available with my FundMe contract?
I was curious about this too. So I did some investigating.
I reasoned that the fundMe contract is being deployed with ethers. More specifically deploy-ethers I believe, which adds additional functionality to the ethers library.
fundMe = await ethers.getContract("FundMe", deployer)
At any rate I figured I would begin my search in the ethers documentation
I reasoned that fundMe is a contract. So I took a look at the contract section of the documentation. If you scroll down on the left menu
bar you will see a section called Contract. Then after briefly looking through that section I saw that contract has a property called provider.
So then I clicked on provider which takes you to some documentation regarding provider. And it is there that you can see a function exposed by the provider object called getAddress.