The default template that Vue creates uses Karma and Nightwatch for Unit Testing in the browser. This is awesome.
Often, however, sometimes you want to just run the unit tests in Node without having the overhead and time penalty of spinning up and running in Selenium or the Browser.
I searched around multiple recommendations on how to do this with no luck. Everyone has a piece of the puzzle but I couldn't find a easy way to put them together in one place that worked.
So after many hours of experimenting I found out how to make it work and made a very slim sample project to demonstrate how to set this up.
npm install (or yarn install)
npm test
You should be able to install your dependencies and then run an example test case using Mocha.
For the webpack configuration, see the webpack.config.js for how this was configured. I'm not a webpack expert by any means but I tried to comment out what I did and what the purpose is of most of the important entries.
This featues using the following:
- VueJS 2.x+
- JSDOM
- webpack
- Babel (from ES6+ to ES5)
- Mocha (+ should assertion library, but you can use whatever you want)
You can see how I setup running mocha by examining package.json for the script test reference:
npm run build && mocha -r jsdom-global/register ./dist/bundle.js
This will first build the webpack bundle in dist/bundle.js and then execute mocha. The -r jsdom-global/register will register JSDOM globals for typical browser variables such as window and document before executing your tests. You could also simply require("jsdom-global/register") in your test cases if you'd prefer that.
For webpack, it will simply bundle all your test and source files specified in webpack.config.js into the dist directory in one bundled file named bundle.js. This file will only include your transformed file and will excluded any node available packages such as what's in node_modules. This enables you to use node to load your bundled JS and mocha will then run them (the test cases) automatically.
Jeff Haynie @jhaynie
MIT. Pull requests encouraged and welcome.