jstesting

Browser-based development can sometimes be a challenge when trying utilize code sharing (http://jamisondance.com/2012/6/21/browser-code-sharing-is-terribad/).
Add in module loading, unit testing, and automation...and things get hairy. Until the community comes to a solution, this repo provides a boilerplate for getting up and running with AMD and unit test automation.

Most of what is listed here is learned through painful experience at my day job. If you know of better ways to solve these problems, please let me know!

Javascript unit testing with:

• Jasmine - Jasmine is a behavior-driven development framework for testing JavaScript code.
• RequireJS/AMD - RequireJS is an AMD (asynchronus module definition) javascript file and module loader.
• jsTestDriver - Cross-browser test automation with code coverage.
• PhantomJS - Headless webkit

Requirements

The shell scripts assume that the following are installed with binarys available at the local path

• JRE 1.6 - Used to startup the jsTestDriver jars
• PhantomJS - PhantomJS is used for a completely headless execution of the tests

Executing the test

This example only has one test spec/fooSpec.js which tests the module src/foo.js

The tests can be started multiple ways:

• Open specRunner.html - If using chrome make sure that the flag --allow-file-access-from-files is set when booting chrome. This is the easiest way to run the test.

• Start the jsTestDriver server and connect a set of browsers to it which will automatically run the tests. Start the server by executing at the root of the repo the following:

  sh serverInit.sh

  In as many browsers as you want, open the url http://localhost:9876/capture. Then at another command prompt, execute:

  sh runJasmineTests.sh

  This will send the test and its dependencies to each connected browser and execute them. You can easily set up various machines running different versions of browsers and have them all connected to the test server. This can provide some level of automation in executing the tests in various browser environments.

• Run the tests entirely headless with PhantomJS connecting to jsTestDriver (there is an 8 second delay after starting the jsTestDriver server before connecting the PhantomJS client). Upon completion the jsTestDriver server and phantomjs process are automatically killed:

  sh startTestAutomation.sh

Viewing Code Coverage

Of the three ways for running the tests above, the latter 2 will provide test output results in testOutputDir. The output is in standard junit xml. The code coverage is located in testOutputDir/jsTestDriver.conf-coverage.dat and is in gcc's lcov format. Use genhtml or something similar to generate html output (or parse the results yourself).