Semtest

A(nother ?) light unit test framework for nodejs

semtest: (javascript) => TAP

So what is this about ?

Concieved during the time I was writing Semverse, Semtest is a simple yet efficient unit test framework for nodejs apps. Its main goal (besides honing my skills on developing and maintaining an npm module) is to alleviate all the boilerplate around:

• testing code with Tape (in its Blue-Tape version), which outputs a nice TAP output
• enforcing unit test best practices, such as no state sharing between tests, function focused tests, and self-documenting code

I also decided that I would apply the same standards I apply on all my current projects:

• 100 percent unit test coverage
• JSLint compliance
• Functional programming all the way !
• Semantic versioning
• ES2015 javascript

Installation

Installation is pretty straightforward :

$ npm install --save-dev semtest

Usage

$ node your_spec_file.js

or, since tape allows for globbing, and is a direct dependency of this package anyway:

$ tape '**/*.spec.js'

or, since a lot of us uses build pipelines, you can pipe the sources with your favorite build tool. These specs files are autonomous javascript files so you can run them anyway you want. Hurray, separation of concerns !

Documentation

You execute your unit tests with a clean, predefined structure that will help you both ensure your module works as expected regardless of its dependencies, and document your code behaviour way better than any comment could ever do: executeTests: (moduleDescription, functionAssertions) => TAP output

executeTests is a function that takes as input the module description (for documentation) and an array of function assertions blocks (more on that later) and output unit tests results in TAP format on stdout: executeTests: (moduleDescription, functionAssertionsBlocks) => TAP (on stdout)

// Let's consider a "myModule" method that uses "dependencyC":
myModule.myFunction = (a) => dependencyC(a);
 
// We can test it like this:
semtest.executeTests("My powerful module", [{
    name: "myFunction()",
    assertions: [{
        when: "it's called with a truthy value",
        should: "return 'qux'",
        test: function (t) {
            t.equal(
                myStubbedModule.myFunction(true),
                "qux"
            );
            t.end();
        }
    }]
}]);
 
// This will output a TAP stream that you can pipe into TAP readers like faucet or tap-spec, or even Jenkins TAP Plugin

Assertions structure

Assertions are maps that should have these keys:

• "when" and "should" are properties that will document your unit test. "when" is optional because sometimes you want to test assertions that are always true, thus making "when" akward to define. "Should", on the other hand, is mandatory, of course, because every assertion exist to test a specific result, behaviour, or effect.
• "test" is the actual unit test, written like a Blue-Tape function, which is a function that take the Blue-Tape assert object as parameter (commonly known as "t") and should either output a promise (whose resolved/rejected status will pass or fail the test) or call the "plan"/"end" Tape methods.
• You can also use the boolean keys "only" and "skip". The former will allow you to indicate to semtest that you only want a specific assertion to run for its suite, the latter will indiciate that you want to skip this test: it will not be executed and will not appear in the results.

Assertions for a function are bundled in a function assertion block, which is an object with two keys:

• "name" is the function name
• "assertions" is an array of assertions, defined above.

executeTests will then, take an array of function assertion blocks as its second input to, as you can expect it, run every unit test, of every function.

Every assertions will then be output on stdout as TAP with a description built like this:

"module" - "function": when "assertion.when", it should "assertion.should"

If we reuse our myModule example and pipe the result in faucet, we'll get:

$ node myModule.spec.js | faucet
myModule - myFunction: when it's called with a truthy value, it should return 'qux'
# tests 1
# pass 1
ok

The additional bonus of such structure is that you can fold your code in spec files to only show the documentation part, enabling your to truly document your code with specs, which they are for in the first place :

executeTests("Test helpers library", [{
    name: "rejectFnHO()",
    assertions: [{
        when: "its returned function is not given a rejection reason",
        should: "return a function that returns the base reason",
        test: (test) => test((t) =>
                [..............................................]
        )
    }, {
        when: "its returned function is given a rejection reason",
        should: "return a function that returns the given reason",
        test: (test) => test((t) =>
                [..............................................]
        )
    }]
}

Here, whatever the [.....] cover, we can focus on the litteral description of our code instead.

Since the spec files aren't meant to be delivered in production, we can make them as bloated as we want, for the sake of code literacy instead of performance.

Coverage

This module is fully compatible with any coverage tool as far as I know. I recommend nyc but you're free to use your favorite, of course !

Utility functions

utilityFunctions is a collection of one-liners that are very useful to stub you dependencies with:

// Instead of defining the same stubs over and over again :
const myModule = myModuleWrapper(
    '~/projects/myProject/myModule.js',
    {
        foo: () => Promise.resolve(true),
        bar: () => Promise.reject(new Error("Oups")),
        baz: () => () => Promise.reject(new Error("Oups")),
        qux: () => () => null,
        derp: (a) => a
    }
);
 
// We can use utilityFunctions as quicker and more consistent way :
const u = require("semtest").utilityFunctions;
 
const myModuleMock = {
        foo: u.resolveFn(true),
        bar: u.rejectFn("Oups"),
        baz: u.rejectFnHO("Oups"),
        qux: u.nullFn,
        derp: u.idFn
    }
);

Licence

Do whatever you want with the code, just tell me about it so that I can know at least one person read it xD

Contributing

Open issues and send me PRs like there's no tomorrow, be my guest !