☕ Run Mocha tests using headless Google Chrome
mocha-chrome
requires Node v10 or higher.
mocha-chrome
is a development tool, which means you can use tools like NVM and nodenv to manage your installed versions, and temporarily switch to v8+ to run tests on your machine. Most modern CI environments also support specifying the version of Node to run.
To begin, you'll need to install mocha-chrome
:
$ npm install mocha-chrome --save-dev
Then you'll need a local npm install of mocha:
$ npm install mocha --save-dev
To run the tests, you'll need an HTML file with some basics:
<!doctype>
<html>
<head>
<title>Test</title>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="../../node_modules/mocha/mocha.css" />
<script src="../../node_modules/mocha/mocha.js"></script>
<script src="../../node_modules/chai/chai.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="mocha"></div>
<script>
expect = chai.expect;
// add tests here
mocha.run();
</script>
</body>
</html>
You can then add your tests either through an external script file or inline within a <script>
tag. Running the tests is easy, either with the CLI binary, or programmatically.
$ mocha-chrome --help
Usage
$ mocha-chrome <file.html> [options]
Options
--chrome-flags A JSON string representing an array of flags to pass to Chrome
--chrome-launcher Chrome launcher options (see https://github.com/GoogleChrome/chrome-launcher#launchopts)
--ignore-console Suppress console logging
--ignore-exceptions Suppress exceptions logging
--ignore-resource-errors Suppress resource error logging
--log-level Specify a log level; trace, debug, info, warn, error
--mocha A JSON string representing a config object to pass to Mocha
--no-colors Disable colors in Mocha's output
--reporter Specify the Mocha reporter to use
--timeout Specify the test startup timeout to use
--version
Examples
$ mocha-chrome test.html --no-colors
$ mocha-chrome test.html --reporter dot
$ mocha-chrome test.html --mocha '\{"ui":"tdd"\}'
$ mocha-chrome test.html --chrome-flags '["--some-flag", "--and-another-one"]'
$ mocha-chrome test.html --chrome-launcher.maxConnectionRetries=10
mocha-chrome
is technically an event emitter. Due to the asynchronous nature of nearly every interaction with headless Chrome, a simple event bus is used to handle actions from the browser. You have access to those events if running mocha-chrome
programatically.
Example usage can be found in both test.js and bin/mocha-chrome.
Fired to indicate that mocha-chrome
should configure mocha.
Fired when all tests have ended.
stats
: object
- A Mocha stats object. eg:
{
suites: 1,
tests: 1,
passes: 1,
pending: 0,
failures: 0,
start: '2017-08-03T02:12:02.007Z',
end: '2017-08-03T02:12:02.017Z',
duration: 10
}
Fired to indicate that the mocha script in the client has been loaded.
Fired when a resource fails to load.
data
: object
- An object containing information about the resource. eg:
{ url, method, reason }
Fired when a resource fails to load.
tests
: number
- The number of tests being run.
Fired to indicate that mocha-chrome
should inform mocha of the width of the current console/terminal.
Reporters are limited to those which don't use process.stdout.write
to manipulate terminal output. eg. spec
, xunit
, etc. Examples of reporters which don't presently produce expected output formatting include dot
and nyan
. The cause of this limitation is the lack of a good means to pipe Mocha's built-in stdout.write
through the Chrome Devtools Protocol to mocha-chrome
.
Third party reporters are not currently supported, but support is planned. Contribution on that effort is of course welcome.
Chrome has long-since disabled cookies for files loaded via the file://
protocol. The once-available --enable-file-cookies
has been removed and we're left with few options. If you're in need of cookie support for your local-file test, you may use the following snippet, which will shim document.cookie
with very basic support:
Object.defineProperty(document, 'cookie', {
get: function () {
return this.value || '';
},
set: function (cookie) {
cookie = cookie || '';
const cutoff = cookie.indexOf(';');
const pair = cookie.substring(0, cutoff >= 0 ? cutoff : cookie.length);
const cookies = this.value ? this.value.split('; ') : [];
cookies.push(pair);
return this.value = cookies.join('; ');
}
});
Running on Circle CI requires that Chrome is installed and running in the container your tests are running within. Please refer to this article for details: https://discuss.circleci.com/t/installing-chrome-inside-of-your-docker-container/9067. Alternatively, you can use a pre-built CircleCI image with browsers installed. You'll have to choose a tag with the -browsers
suffix from the full tag list.
Please refer to the "Running it all on Travis CI" portion of the guide on Automated testing with Headless Chrome from Google. Though the article primarily addresses Karma, the setup for Travis CI is identical.
As of January 8th, 2018, Travis CI has upgraded from Trusty -> Xenial to address the Meltdown security vulnerability. There are issues with Chrome in Xenial that can currently be worked around with sudo: required
. At some point this workaround may be removable. For the near term, please add sudo: required
to Travis CI configuration files. See travis-ci/travis-ci#8836. Credit: @smalls.
$ npm test
Yep, that's it.
We welcome your contributions! Please have a read of CONTRIBUTING.
I'd like to thank @nathanboktae for his work on mocha-phantomjs and mocha-phantomjs-core; two projects I've used extensively over the years, and from which the inspiration for this module originates. Many of the nuances of working with mocha in a hosted or connected browser environment were solved within mocha-phantomjs-core
and I am personally grateful.