meteortesting:mocha

Formerly published as dispatch:mocha. Originally created by Dispatch but now community maintained.

A Mocha test driver package for Meteor. This package reports server AND client test results in the server console and can be used for running tests on a CI server or locally.

Installation

In a Meteor 1.3+ app directory:

meteor add meteortesting:mocha

Not installing the package is possible but not advisable when creating a CI pipeline because the system will always download the latest version available, which might break your CI pipeline in a future major release of this package.

Since version 2.0.0 the package lmieulet:meteor-coverage is no longer bundled with this package. If you permanently want code coverage please run:

meteor add lmieulet:meteor-coverage

If you rather want the package to be included only for a single run, add the parameter --extra-packages lmieulet:meteor-coverage as shown to your meteor test command:

meteor test --driver-package meteortesting:mocha --extra-packages lmieulet:meteor-coverage

Run app tests

To watch your tests in Meteor 1.8.1+:

meteor test --driver-package meteortesting:mocha
meteor test --driver-package meteortesting:mocha --full-app

NOTE: Watch mode does not properly rerun client tests if you run a headless browser and change only client code. To work around this, you can add or remove whitespace from a server file, and that will trigger both server and client tests to rerun.

If you want the process to exit after all tests are done, add the flag --once:

meteor test --driver-package meteortesting:mocha --once
meteor test --driver-package meteortesting:mocha --once --full-app

In Meteor <1.8.1, you must add TEST_WATCH=1 if you do not add the --once flag. For example:

TEST_WATCH=1 meteor test --driver-package meteortesting:mocha
TEST_WATCH=1 meteor test --driver-package meteortesting:mocha --full-app

If you have client tests, you can either open any browser to run them, or install a browser driver to run them headless.

Run client tests in any browser manually

Load http://localhost:3000 in a browser to run your client tests and see the results. This only works well in watch mode because otherwise the server will likely shut down before you finish running the client tests.

The test results are reported in a div with ID mocha. If you run with the --full-app flag, this will likely be overlaid weirdly on top of your app, so you should add CSS to your app in order to be able to see both. For example, this will put the test results in a sidebar with resizeable width:

div#mocha {
  background: white;
  border-right: 2px solid black;
  height: 100%;
  left: 0;
  margin: 0;
  overflow: auto;
  padding: 1rem;
  position: fixed;
  resize: horizontal;
  top: 0;
  width: 20px;
  z-index: 1000;
}

Run client tests headless

Support for running browser in headless mode is made possible by the package `` which this plugin depends on. Please refer to their documentation for further information: https://github.com/meteortesting/meteor-browser-tests#dependencies

Run only server or only client tests

By default both server and client tests run. To disable server tests: TEST_SERVER=0. Likewise for client: TEST_CLIENT=0

Run tests inclusively (grep) or exclusively (invert)

To run all tests with names that match a pattern, add the environment variable MOCHA_GREP=your_string. This will apply to both client and server tests.

To exclude any tests, you must use the grep option above plus MOCHA_INVERT=1. For example, to exclude tests named 'TODO:' (which you may want to exclude from your continuous integration workflow) you would pass at runtime MOCHA_GREP=your_string MOCHA_INVERT=1

Specify global timeout

To override Mocha's default timeout of 2 seconds for all tests, add the environment variable MOCHA_TIMEOUT=your_timeout_in_ms.

Specify mocha configuration with .mocharc file

You can configure the mocha runner with a .mocharc.js or a .mocharc.json file at the root of your Meteor app. This package uses mocha programmatically, so it supports a constrained list of options.

If both files are defined, .mocharc.js will overwrite the settings in .mocharc.json.

The setting timeout will be overwritten if the environment variable MOCHA_TIMEOUT is set.

• Read more about using mocha and supported options here.
• You can find examples of config files here.

Run in parallel

By default meteortesting:mocha will run in series. This is a safety mechanism since running a client test and server test which depend on DB state may have side effects.

If you design your client and server tests to not share state, then you can run tests faster. Run in parallel by exporting the environment variable TEST_PARALLEL=1 before running.

Write tests to a file

To write the tests to a file, set SERVER_MOCHA_OUTPUT and CLIENT_MOCHA_OUTPUT to the full path + filename, e.g., $PWD/unit_server.txt and $PWD/unit_client.txt. This is specially important when using a format like xunit. The use of XUNIT_FILE is deprecated because it has the same functionality as SERVER_MOCHA_OUTPUT, which is a better fit for what it actually does.

$ MOCHA_REPORTER=xunit SERVER_MOCHA_OUTPUT=$PWD/unit_server.xml CLIENT_MOCHA_OUTPUT=$PWD/unit_client.xml meteor test --once --driver-package meteortesting:mocha

Run with a different server reporter

The default Mocha reporter for server tests is the "spec" reporter. You can set the SERVER_TEST_REPORTER environment variable to change it.

$ SERVER_TEST_REPORTER="dot" meteor test --once --driver-package meteortesting:mocha

Run with a different client reporter

The default Mocha reporter for client tests is the "spec" reporter when running headless and "html" otherwise. You can set the CLIENT_TEST_REPORTER environment variable to change it.

$ CLIENT_TEST_REPORTER="tap" meteor test --once --driver-package meteortesting:mocha

Run with code coverage

Since version 2.0.0 the package lmieulet:meteor-coverage is no longer bundled with this package. If you permanently want code coverage please run:

meteor add lmieulet:meteor-coverage

If you rather want the package to be included only for a single run, add the parameter --extra-packages lmieulet:meteor-coverage as shown to your meteor test command:

meteor test --driver-package meteortesting:mocha --extra-packages lmieulet:meteor-coverage

To enable code coverage you have to set COVERAGE to 1 and COVERAGE_APP_FOLDER to the path of your project. On POSIX systems you can just use COVERAGE_APP_FOLDER=$PWD/ whereby COVERAGE_APP_FOLDER=%cd%\ gives the expected result on Windows.

In addition there are quite some additional options you can set:

• COVERAGE_VERBOSE to see the files included in the coverage and other data that might help if something doesn't work as expected
• COVERAGE_IN_COVERAGE imports a coverage dump (previously create with COVERAGE_OUT_COVERAGE)
• COVERAGE_OUT_COVERAGE creates a dump of the coverage - used when you want to merge several coverage
• COVERAGE_OUT_LCOVONLY creates a lcov report
• COVERAGE_OUT_HTML creates a html report
• COVERAGE_OUT_JSON creates a json report
• COVERAGE_OUT_JSON_SUMMARY creates a json_summary report
• COVERAGE_OUT_TEXT_SUMMARY creates a text_summary report
• COVERAGE_OUT_REMAP remaps the coverage to all the available report formats

Additional information can be found here: https://github.com/serut/meteor-coverage

NPM Scripts

A good best practice is to define these commands as run scripts in your app's package.json file. For example:

"scripts": {
  "pretest": "npm run lint --silent",
  "test-chrome": "TEST_BROWSER_DRIVER=chrome meteor test --once --driver-package meteortesting:mocha",
  "test-app-chrome": "TEST_BROWSER_DRIVER=chrome meteor test --full-app --once --driver-package meteortesting:mocha",
  "test-phantom": "TEST_BROWSER_DRIVER=phantomjs meteor test --once --driver-package meteortesting:mocha",
  "test-app-phantom": "TEST_BROWSER_DRIVER=phantomjs meteor test --full-app --once --driver-package meteortesting:mocha",
  "test-watch": "TEST_BROWSER_DRIVER=chrome meteor test --driver-package meteortesting:mocha",
  "test-app-watch": "TEST_BROWSER_DRIVER=chrome meteor test --full-app --driver-package meteortesting:mocha",
  "test-watch-browser": "meteor test --driver-package meteortesting:mocha",
  "test-app-watch-browser": "meteor test --full-app --driver-package meteortesting:mocha",
  "lint": "eslint .",
  "start": "meteor run"
}

And then run npm run test-chrome, etc.