Use jasmine to test Express.js

Question

I am learning Node.js and Express framework. I am a big fan of jasmine. So I want to use jasmine whenever I can, however, I can\'t find a good way testing Express with jasmine.

Answer 1

Since Jasmine 2 it is very simple to use Jasmine in a Node.js environment. To test express apps with it, I recommend to use Jasmine in combination with supertest.

Here is how such a test looks like:

project/spec/ServerSpec.json

const request = require('supertest');
const app = require('../app');

describe('Server', () => {
  describe('REST API v1', () => {
    it('returns a JSON payload', (done) => {
      request(app)
        .get('/rest/service/v1/categories')
        .expect(200)
        .expect('Content-Type', 'application/json; charset=utf-8')
        .end((error) => (error) ? done.fail(error) : done());
    });
  });
});

Some prerequisites:

1. Install Jasmine v2 as dev dependency in your project: npm i -D jasmine@2
2. Install supertest v3 as dev dependency in your project: npm i -D supertest@3
3. Create an initial Jasmine configuration using jasmine init (Note: You need to install Jasmine globally first if you haven't done already to run this command)
4. Create a specification ending on "Spec.js" (like ServerSpec.js)

Here is how a Jasmine configuration looks like:

project/spec/support/jasmine.json

{
  "helpers": [
    "helpers/**/*.js"
  ],
  "random": false,
  "spec_dir": "spec",
  "spec_files": [
    "**/*[sS]pec.js"
  ],
  "stopSpecOnExpectationFailure": false
}

To run your specifications (test suites) simply add this to your npm scripts and execute npm test (or just npm t):

  "scripts": {
    "test": "jasmine"
  },