Unit tests

Unit tests are for checking that a specific, well-isolated bit of code does what it should. It's especially useful for testing corner cases.

When a test runs some code, we call that code "covered". We're not aiming for 100% coverage, which is almost always a waste of time. But the essential parts of the app should be unit tested.

What unit tests shouldn't do

With few exceptions, unit tests should try not to:

Read/write files from disk
Make network requests (including DNS)

Unit tests should run fast, so that they can be run every time a file is saved, for example.

Running unit tests

All unit tests are run with vanilla node.js, not electron.

Running tests once, in a terminal

Run npm test to run unit tests once. (or npm t for short).

The output is the standard mocha reporter.

Writing unit tests

The unit tests for a/module.ts live in a/module.spec.ts.

This allows one to switch quickly between a file and its test, for example using the Toggle Spec plug-in for Visual Studio.

The test harness we use is simply mocha, with chai and chai-as-promised.

A typical test suite

Let's say we have the following code in src/util/add.ts:

export default function add(a: number, b: number) {
  return a + b;
}

Then in src/util/add.spec.ts, we could have the following test:

import { describe, it, assert } from "../test";

import add from "./add";

describe("util/add", ()=> {
  // always wrap your tests in one or more cases
  it("adds positive numbers", () => {
    assert.equal(add(1, 3), 4);
  });

  it("adds negative numbers", () => {
    assert.equal(add(-3, 9), 6);
  });
});

For more information, visit chai's assert API documentation.

Asynchronous test cases

Test cases can be asynchronous, like so:

describe("request", s => {
  it("can make simple requests", async () => {
    const res = await request("https://itch.io/country", {});
    assert.equal(res.statusCode, 200, "server replies with HTTP 200");
  });
})

You can check that an asynchronous function rejects:

describe("request", s => {
  it("rejects invalid URLs", async t => {
    await assert.isRejected(request("https://itch.io/country", {}))
  });
})

Unit Tests