Running tests in a CI system for SailsJS

I recently started working with SailsJS. I am enjoying some of the libraries and how easy and fast it is to get things up and running. But I do miss some of the built in tools that come with Grails. A good example of this is the "grails test" tool. This made it easy to run unit level tests, integration or functional tests from the command line with the same command line for all of my projects.

grails test-app 

This made it very easy to integrate into a CI tool like TeamCity. I didn't need any special scripts, relative paths or some dark art of getting environment variables right. Things just worked out of the box.

Since SailsJS lets you plug in any testing you want. AKA it does not come built into the framework. I had to figure out how to run the tests in my IDE (Intellij in this case), and in my CI system (TeamCity). As you can see I am trying to keep the tool set in the same family.

I decided to use Mocha as the test framework. It seemed to have everything that I wanted and was the closest to what I was familiar with in the grails framework. But the commands to get it running were a little more than just typing "sailjs test" in my application directory. But I found a cool little trick to make it easy. Using npm and my package.json file. I can use the same command for both CI and IDE.

By simply adding a line to the package.json file in the root directory of the application source I can then call

npm test

Here is an example of my package.json file.

...

  "sails-mongo": "^0.11.1"},
"scripts": {
  "start": "node app.js",
  "test": "node ./node_modules/mocha/bin/_mocha --recursive --ui bdd ./test",
  "debug": "node debug app.js"},
"main": "app.js",

...

The test script calls the node command with the proper mocha script to run my tests. Notice that the path to the mocha script is relative to the application root directory. It is important in the IDE and CI that you set the working directory to the application root. Which should be the default for both. Now I can simply call:

npm test

from the command line, in the IDE, or in the CI system.

DWP