express-middleware-sinon

Testing an express middleware with Sinon and Mocha

Getting started

Installation can be done with npm install, it will add express, chai, sinon and mocha as dependencies.

Once the dependencies are installed you can use the npm test command to execute the unit tests.

Middleware and its tests

The middleware's purpose is to enforce a valid security token for all URLs classed as private. Public URLs do not need to be validated. That gives us the following three unit tests:

private URL invalid token gives status code 403
private URL valid token gives status code 200
public URL returns status code 200 without token

Sinon

Sinon is a mocking/stubbing framework which can help set up test data and fake out collaborating objects/methods for code we are testing.

Stub

Stubs can be used to return canned values from method calls, either by extending existing functions or by creating new ones.

Stubbing a new method

var func = sinon.stub();
func.returns(10)
console.log(func(5,6));   // Gives 10!

Spy

A spy can be used to record how many times a method has been called and with what parameters.

var sum = sinon.spy();
var call1 = sum.getCall(0);
call1(5,6)
console.log(call1.args[0]) // Gives 5
console.log(call1.args[1]) // Gives 6

Sandboxes

A sandbox can be used to provide stubs and spies and keep track of them. At a later time we can call sandbox.restore() to clear out all recorded results in objects we created so far.

var sandbox = sinon.sandbox.create()
var sumSpy = sandbox.spy();
sumSpy(5,7);
sandbox.restore();

mocha/chai

Mocha is a unit test runner, which also provides a DSL very similar to RSpec from the Ruby world.

describe("test suite", function() {
    it("adds 2 and 2 giving 4", function() {
      var calc1 = new Calc();
      assert.ok(calc1.sum(2, 2));
    });
});

Chai provides several fluent assertion libraries that are designed to make tests more readable than using the built-in assert.ok() above.

Here is the previous example repeated with the chai/expect assertion library.