jest.setTimeout is not working in setupFiles

Question

I am using Jest for testing my rest API. Most of my API endpoints take more than 5 seconds to return, so I need to increase the default timeout of 5000ms specified in Jest.

I have 2 test files, suppose: foo.test.js bar.test.js

Now, I can get rid of the timeout error by following 2 ways:

1. Setting timeout values greater than 5000, as the 3rd argument to test or it methods. This works fine, but I need to update all of my existing test cases.
2. Adding jest.setTimeout(20000); at the top of each of my test files. This also works fine. But still, it requires me to update all my existing test files.

I found out that I can instead specify jest.setTimeout(20000); in a separate file, and point to that in setupFiles configuration option for jest in package.json. I did this but the timeout error of exceeding 5000ms started coming up again. My setupFile is being loaded correctly, which I checked by adding some console.log statements to this. But it seems jest.setTimeout(20000) is not having any effect on the test cases.

Answer 1

From the docs for setupFilesAfterEnv:

setupFiles executes before the test framework is installed in the environment

(That information should probably be added to the setupFiles section of the docs as well.)

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setupFiles runs before the test framework is installed. I'm a bit surprised that jest.setTimeout is defined within a setup file. In any case, calling jest.setTimeout doesn't work right from within a file in setupFiles.

Instead, use setupFilesAfterEnv which runs

immediately after the test framework has been installed in the environment

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Note that setupFilesAfterEnv was introduced in version 24.0.0.

If you are using an earlier version of Jest use the older setupTestFrameworkScriptFile instead.