`pattern` CLI option Path Expansion

[shellscape]

Please provide details about:

• What you're trying to do

pnpm exec ava ~/code/tests

This results in an error: Expected pattern to be a non-empty string

The error is both incorrect and unfortunate. The pattern passed was not empty, ava just didn't know what to do with it.

• Why you can't use AVA for this

Oodles of tertiary tooling will provide paths with a leading tilde. However correct or incorrect that is, it would be useful for local tooling to be able to leverage a tilde as a home directory path.

• And maybe how you think AVA could handle this

Execute a resolve on the passed pattern if it doesn't match any of the other expected shapes, or begins with a tilde.

→ node
Welcome to Node.js v18.15.0.
Type ".help" for more information.
> const { resolve } = require('path')
undefined
> resolve('~')
'/Users/user/code/test/~'

[shellscape]

Related to this:

• absolute paths don't work (and this isn't documented) e.g. /Users/user/code/test
• local path relative directory specifier doesn't work (and this isn't documented) e.g. ./

[novemberborn]

Do you have a stack trace for that error?

The pattern is resolved against to the current working directory and then made relative against the project directory:

https://github.com/avajs/ava/blob/63987725957114ea92dab430b7795ecc649ff107/lib/cli.js#L419

However it doesn't look like that expands the ~.

I'd expect absolute paths to be resolved, however (as I recall) AVA cannot run test files outside of the project directory. Perhaps that could be communicated better.

Local paths really should work.

[shellscape]

I'll be doing some additional testing today for a related moon issue and will grab a stack trace then.