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What are the best Node. js unit testing frameworks? According to “The State of JavaScript 2021,” the most popular JavaScript testing frameworks and libraries in 2021 were Testing Library, Vitest, Jest, Cypress, Playwright, and Storybook. Rounding out the top ten are Puppeteer, Mocha, Jasmine, AVA, and WebdriverIO.
If you've ever written tests for a Node. js application, chances are you used an external library. However, you don't need a library to run unit tests in Javascript.
Jest is also faster than Mocha. It has built-in support for snapshot testing, which means tests are run automatically on each change to the code. This makes it easy to keep your tests up to date as you work. Mocha has more features out of the box since it is a more mature tool with a larger community of contributors.
The assert module. The basis for most Node unit testing is the built-in assert module, which tests a condition and, if the condition isn't met, throws an error. Node's assert module is used by many third-party testing frameworks. Even without a testing framework, you can do useful testing with it.
Update:
Mocha is the best in my opinion.
What is the experience with these frameworks?
I played with expresso which is pretty cool testing framework which also has test-coverage. It has been created by TJ Holowaychuk who is also the creator of Express.js (insanely fast (and small) server-side JavaScript web development framework built on Node.js and Connect). I recently saw that he also has a cool library called should.js which can be used together with Expresso for a even better testing experience.
Obviously, the ability to run in the browser would be a big bonus
I don't believe it can run in the browser, but I also don't get why you would want to run it inside the browser?
but I'm mainly interested in Node.js. Something with a heavily asynchronous slant would be great.
Quote from the expresso:
The argument passed to each callback is beforeExit, which is typically used to assert that callbacks have been invoked.
You can use beforeExit to test asynchronous functions.
TIP: Follow TJ Holowaychuk on GitHub, because he creates very good open-source code.
I use VowsJS which is easy to use async BDD framework (Behaviour Driven Development) and get the job done.
From what I see lately it's what many chose to test their NPM modules, so I believe so far it's one the best to use.
Some popular testing frameworks that could be used with NodeJS are also those:
You can also see a list of JavaScript test frameworks here
Few more libs that could help you write better code are those:
There is also Bamboo CI Server by Atlassian it automates builds and tests. It is a package for Apache/Tomcat (which sux because it uses Java and that makes it very heavy) also is not free but it has a starter license which costs $10 so I believe it is affordable. It is the most featured of all CI servers I found so far and it supports all unit tests that support xUnit that means that you can run builds/tests for any language with Bamboo.
Another option for CI with NodeJS is Travis which lot of people use for their open source projects, as it says A hosted continuous integration service for the open source community.
There is also a google group discussion with Continuous Integration for Node JS Projects topic.
Based on the asker's comments above, I tried out vows, and it solved a lot of problems I was having with my async testing. Its ability to mix serial and parallel testing is awesome.
Make sure you read the guidance doc carefully, but once you get the hang of it, it's flexible, powerful, and produces nice, clean results.
UPDATE: I would also encourage people to check out should for their asserts. It allows for very flexible, very readable asserts, and is compatible with both Expresso and Vows, and probably most other test frameworks as well.
(I'm posting this as a separate answer just in case people don't notice the comments on Alfred's answer.)
UPDATE 1/7/2015: For what it's worth, I have since switched from Vows to Mocha, and from Should to Chai. Mocha has much better support now for asynchronous tests using promises, and Chai allows for several flexible assert options, including the expect api, for those who don't like to modify the object prototype.
I've started using Jasmine for my JavaScript testing specifically because it's small and runs in both the browser and node. It's also got a really solid reporting and matcher API so it's easy to integrate with other tools in the future. Having a buildin mocking framework is also useful since it's often one of the first things I would add when I was using qunit for TDD in the browser.
If you want a true BDD framework then maybe consider Yadda. It integrates with mocha, jasmine, nodeunit, qunit, zombie and casperjs, to support feature files, e.g.
Scenario: provides the version of all services
given service x is running
and service y is running
when I request the service versions
then service x should be version 0.0.1
and service y should be version 0.0.2
I've been using nodeunit and its ability to work with async functions is reasonably straightforward.
There's a nice walkthrough that should get you ready-to-go with nodeunit on his blog.
[ Note: the API has changed since the blogpost – setUp(callback) and tearDown(callback) both take a callback as an argument, which you need to call when your setup/teardown is complete. ]
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