React Testing Library: When to use userEvent.click and when to use fireEvent

Question

I'm presently learning React-Testing-Library.

I'd like to test mouse interaction with an element. Presently it's a bit unclear to me the difference between userEvent.click(element) and fireEvent.click(element). Are both recommended for use, and in the example below are they being correctly implemented?

const mockFunction = jest.fn(() => console.info('button clicked'));
const { getByTestId } = render(<MyAwesomeButton onClick={mockFunction} />);
const myAwesomeButton = getByTestId('my-awesome-button');

// Solution A
fireEvent(myAwesomeButton)
expect(mockFunction.toHaveBeenCalledTimes(1);

// Solution B
userEvent.click(myAwesomeButton);
expect(mockFunction).toHaveBeenCalledTimes(1);

Thanks in advance for any clarity.

Answer 1

Behind the scenes, userEvent uses the fireEvent. You can consider fireEvent being the low-level api, while userEvent sets a flow of actions.

Here is the code for userEvent.click

You can see that depending of which element you are trying to click, userEvent will do a set of different actions (e.g. if it's a label or a checkbox).