Unit testing nodejs with Mocha and Chai

There are a lot of unit testing frameworks available for Javascript, Jasmine and Karma being some of the older and more popular ones.

Jasmine and Karma, though are, originally designed for browser-side JS, and hence, frameworks like NodeUnit and Mocha have become more popular with server-size JS.
We needed code coverage reports to work after the unit tests, and the Jasmine-Node reports were not sufficient, so we just moved to using Mocha.

When using Mocha, we can use some assert library (which is not necessary, but makes life a hell lot easier). We are using chai at the open-event-webapp..

First of all install mocha globally –

npm install -g mocha

And write your tests in the test/ folder that mocha by default considers as the folder containing your test specs. For example we have our tests here – https://github.com/fossasia/open-event-webapp/tree/master/test

Writing a simple mocha test is as easy as this –

var assert = require('chai').assert;
describe('Array', function() {
  describe('#indexOf()', function() {
    it('should return -1 when the value is not present', function() {
      assert.equal(-1, [1,2,3].indexOf(5));
      assert.equal(-1, [1,2,3].indexOf(0));
    });
  });
});

The first parameter inside describe() is just to show the tests in a aesthetic way in the console.

You can see our tests described in this fileĀ  – https://github.com/fossasia/open-event-webapp/blob/master/test/serverTest.js

And attached below is an screenshot of the terminal after I have run the command mocha in the root of my project

Screenshot from 2016-07-10 04-42-26

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