How use mocha test framework with node.js and sails.js

Question

I want to use mocha for node.js. The last test framework I used was Rspec from Ruby on Rails so I'm trying to do it in the same way but I get cnfused by the huge framework and all the libraries I could use.

I'm following the official get started but it doesn't explains how organize the tests.

http://visionmedia.github.io/mocha/#installation

Now, I'm reading that I can use the following libraries:

• https://github.com/visionmedia/should.js - Something to test model instances.
• https://github.com/LearnBoost/expect.js - Minimalistic BDD assertion toolkit based on should.js
• http://chaijs.com/ - Looks big, includes should, expect and another lib
• https://github.com/visionmedia/better-assert - Better c-style assertions using callsite for self-documenting failure messages. (I actually don't understand the purpose so far, looks not better than others)
• https://github.com/rjanicek/mocha.js-haxe - Looks to be used browser side, but mocha also said that it's running browser side.

And I know there are more, this is just the list I saw on mocha official website. For what I can understand, it looks like chai is the one to use with mocha, what do you think about that?

And, so far, I never saw anything to help me to decide where write the tests (okay, in /test/, of course) and how organize everything.

I'm also use the great sails.js framework (based on express) and pomelo.js for different projects, I need to use the same kind of tests on both frameworks, so I'm looking for a general architecture and libraries that I can use on both (so, something not specific to sails.js but usable directly from any other framework)

This is how I plan to organize my tests, do you think that's a correct architecture?

The main issue with node is that there are a lot of frameworks, plugins, libraries and I dont know what's the best choice, node.js is really huge with a big community and that's really difficult to have an overview of all the possibilities.

How do you deal with your tests?

Answer 1

I found the blog post Unit Testing Sails.js Applications With Mocha helpful in regards to setting up and organizing tests.

However, because I'm using Sails version 0.10.5, I decided to clean up the Grunt configuration a bit. I added a file named mocha.js in the tasks/config/ folder with the following code:

module.exports = function(grunt) {

  grunt.config.set('mochaTest', {
      test: {
        options: {
          reporter: 'spec'
        },
        src: ['tests/**/*.spec.js']
      }
  });

  grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-mocha-test');

};

I then registered the task by creating a file named test.js inside of tasks/register. Inside this file, I added the following code.

module.exports = function (grunt) {
    grunt.registerTask('test', [
            'mochaTest'
        ]
    );
};

You can then run grunt test to see the results.