meteortesting:mocha

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

A Mocha test driver package for Meteor 1.3. 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. This achieves what spacejam does but without the need for a separate Node package.

Installation

In a Meteor 1.3+ app directory:

meteor add meteortesting:mocha

Run app tests

To run unit tests one time and exit:

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

To run full-app tests one time and exit:

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

To run in watch mode, restarting as you change files, add TEST_WATCH=1 before your test command and remove the --once flag. For example:

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

NOTE: Watch mode does not properly rerun client tests if you 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 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

You'll need to specify which headless browser to use and install the necessary NPM packages. To do this, set the TEST_BROWSER_DRIVER environment variable. There are currently 3 supported browsers:

Chrome

Meteor 1.6+:

$ meteor npm i --save-dev selenium-webdriver chromedriver
$ TEST_BROWSER_DRIVER=chrome meteor test --once --driver-package meteortesting:mocha

Meteor < 1.6:

NOTE: Currently you must pin to exactly version 3.0.0-beta-2 of selenium-webdriver for earlier versions of Meteor because the latest webdriver package only works on Node 6.x+. The -E in the command below is important!

$ meteor npm i -E --save-dev selenium-webdriver@3.0.0-beta-2
$ meteor npm i --save-dev chromedriver
$ TEST_BROWSER_DRIVER=chrome meteor test --once --driver-package meteortesting:mocha

Nightmare/Electron

$ meteor npm i --save-dev nightmare
$ TEST_BROWSER_DRIVER=nightmare meteor test --once --driver-package meteortesting:mocha

You can export TEST_BROWSER_VISIBLE=1 to show the Electron window while tests run.

PhantomJS

$ meteor npm i --save-dev phantomjs-prebuilt
$ TEST_BROWSER_DRIVER=phantomjs meteor test --once --driver-package meteortesting:mocha

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

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.

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

Generate an XUnit file for server tests

To generate an XUnit file, set SERVER_TEST_REPORTER to xunit and set XUNIT_FILE to the full path + filename, e.g., $PWD/unit.xml.

$ SERVER_TEST_REPORTER=xunit XUNIT_FILE=$PWD/unit.xml meteor test --once --driver-package meteortesting:mocha

Run with a different client reporter

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

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

Because of the differences between client and server code, not all reporters will work as client reporters. "spec" and "tap" are confirmed to work.

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 TEST_WATCH=1 meteor test --driver-package meteortesting:mocha",
  "test-app-watch": "TEST_BROWSER_DRIVER=chrome TEST_WATCH=1 meteor test --full-app --driver-package meteortesting:mocha",
  "test-watch-browser": "TEST_WATCH=1 meteor test --driver-package meteortesting:mocha",
  "test-app-watch-browser": "TEST_WATCH=1 meteor test --full-app --driver-package meteortesting:mocha",
  "lint": "eslint .",
  "start": "meteor run"
}

And then run npm run test-chrome, etc.