NodeJS Test Examples

This project is an example project to demonstrate how to write tests in NodeJS. We will look at how to:

• Test regular NodeJS modules
• Test interactions with the database
• Test API requests
• Headless browser testing on the server side (with PhantomJS)

This project serves as an introduction to testing with NodeJS. If you're a beginner to NodeJS, new to writing tests, or just checking things out, have fun and let me know what you think!

Check out the project's documentation page, and the Github project page!

Main Content

Four different parts of this exercise. You can look at the documentation, and comparing the actual code as well as the test cases!

Simple function testing

This is a straightforward one. We'll just take a simple function and test the hell outta it. Hey, you always want to make sure the code you wrote works!

• Function code
• Test code

Database testing

We have two simple functions that interact with the database -- get and createOrUpdate. Let's setup and create mocks, run tests to make sure things are working properly, and nicely clean things up after we're done.

• Function code
• Test code

API Testing

So we have REST api and we want to make sure it works. Let's start a server, make calls to it and check if it returns the desired results!

• Function code
• Test code

Headless Browser Testing

Sometimes it's too slow to need to open every single page on your website every single time you want to deploy a site, just to see if everything is working. Let's start a server, get a headless zombie ghost phantom tester thing to go through the site and see if things are working!

• Test code

Remember to start the server yourself at least once to go through and see what's happening on the site, before we try to emulate things with our little phantom!

Little extras

• Writing a configuration file
• Some test helpers

Tools that we'll need

• Mocha, our testing framework of choice
• Chai as our assertion library
• PhantomJS as our ghostly, headless browser testing tool

And of course, I'd assume that you already have some prior experience with awesome tools like Express, Request, Async and so forth. If you haven't, go check it out!

This project is written in CoffeeScript, but the concepts presented are absolutely the same with what you're going to do with JavaScript. As long as you understand what's happening, you can apply it anywhere!

Setting up

First thing first, setting up this repo is easy as ABC.

git clone https://github.com/conancat/node-test-examples.git
cd node-test-examples
npm install

Also, you'll need to have Mocha installed as an executable by doing:

npm install mocha -g

You'll also need to install PhantomJS in order for the browser tests to work. You can follow the instructions on (installing PhantomJS)[http://phantomjs.org/download.html] here.

Running the app

At the root of the folder, type

node app.js

Then you can go to http://localhost:3000 to see what the app does. Yeah, we're gonna test the hell outta this simple app that asks for your name, your age and your favorite food!

Running the tests

At the root folder of this project, type

mocha

Then the tests should run. Yay! If you want a more verbose version of the test results, you can type this instead:

mocha -R spec

Some other commands

If you want to fork this repo, feel free to do so! Here are some Cake tasks that you can use:

• cake watch -- Compiles all CoffeeScript files
• cake docs -- Generates the documents under the gh-pages branch

You can type cake in the root folder to see more details.

Contact Me

If you have any questions, you can also find me on Twitter or email me at [email protected]. I won't bite, I promise!