route-async

A route-wrapper allowing use of async / await syntax in Express route controllers.

To Use

npm install route-async

Wrap an async route

Assuming you have some async helper function called someAsync, you might have a route looking a bit like this:

const asyncRoute = require('route-async')
const someAsync = require('./helpers/someAsync')

const myRoute = async (req, res) => {
  const result = await someAsync(req.body)
  res.json(result)
}

module.exports = asyncRoute(myRoute)

The asyncRoute wrapper simply takes your route and wraps it, such that the async promise is either resolved internally, or if rejected a next function is called. The default next is just console.error and you can supply your own.

What about if my route wants next

Your route should not attempt to handle its own errors, but simply throw an Error, or even better an HttpError that gets caught by the async-route wrapper.

This keeps your core route code much simpler.

Testing async routes

The following example leverages mocha, sinon, and proxyquire to unit test the above route by supplying a spy in the place of the next function.

const { expect } = require('chai')
const { spy, stub } = require('sinon')
const proxyquire = require('proxyquire')

describe('src/routes/myRoute', () => {
  const mockSomeAsync = stub()

  const myRoute = proxyquire('../../src/routes/myRoute', {
    './helpers/someAsync': mockSomeAsync
  })

  const req = { body: 'some body' }
  const res = { json: stub() }
  const next = spy()

  const resetStubs = () => {
    res.json.resetHistory()
    next.resetHistory()
  }

  context('no errors', () => {
    const result = 'some result'

    before(async () => {
      mockSomeAsync.resolves(result)
      await myRoute(req, res, next)
    })

    after(resetStubs)

    it('called someAsync with the right data', () => {
      expect(mockSomeAsync).to.have.been.calledWith(req.body)
    })

    it('called res.json with the right data', () => {
      expect(res.json).to.have.been.calledWith(result)
    })

    it("didn't call next", () => {
      expect(next).not.to.have.been.called
    })
  })

  context('has errors', () => {
    const error = 'some error'

    before(async () => {
      mockSomeAsync.rejects(error)
      await myRoute(req, res, next)
    })

    after(resetStubs)

    it('called someAsync with the right data', () => {
      expect(mockSomeAsync).to.have.been.calledWith(req.body)
    })

    it("didn't call res.json", () => {
      expect(res.json).not.to.have.been.called
    })

    it('called next with the error', () => {
      expect(next).to.have.been.calledWith(error)
    })
  })
})

Development

Branches

Branch	Status	Coverage	Audit	Comments
develop				Work in progress
main				Latest release

Prerequisites

• NodeJS. I use nvm to manage Node versions — brew install nvm.

Initialisation

npm install

Test it

• npm test — runs the unit tests
• npm run test:unit:cov — runs the tests with code coverage output.

Lint it

npm run lint

Contributing

Please see the contributing notes.