When everything works and clients are happy, sometimes we forget to upgrade stuff. That’s how a jsdom version from 2016 ended up in our testing stack.

If you used Mocha earlier for testing web apps, you already know that you have to set up jsdom manually.

I decided to replace Mocha with Jest while I was searching jsdom’s issue tracker and run into a post.

It was about changing something in the preconfigured jsdom that comes with Jest.

I was like, wait, you don’t configure jsdom anymore?

It turned out that Jest has a configuration option testEnvironment, that gives your test environment, a fully configured and working version of jsdom.

From this point, it was all downhill. I had the whole day allocated for the upgrade but I did it in a few hours.

I’ll show you how I tweaked our Mocha setup to work with Jest. Where was the environment setup moved which functions needed rename or refactoring and how the Babel configuration was updated.

If you’re new to Jest, check out their Getting Started page.

Configuration

Mocha

There are several ways to configure Mocha. The mocha.opts file we used is already deprecated, but later I’m going to reference its contents:

--reporter spec --ui bdd --colors --file test_helpers/babel_loader.js --file test_helpers/jsdom_setup.js --file test_helpers/test_setup.js

and this is how we used to run Mocha:

mocha --opts mocha.opts

Jest

Jest can be configured with jest.config.js , any js or JSON file with the --config flag, and in package.json , see Configuring Jest. I suggest starting with package.json. Once the configuration gets more complicated, move it to a separate file. In package.json you should use the key “jest” on top level, like this:

{ "name": "my-project", "jest": { "verbose": true } }

finally run Jest as:

jest

Initializing environments

Mocha

In our case test_helpers/test_setup.js had the environment setup.

To keep things simple, let’s say we needed only a Sinon sandbox.

If you’re using React, this is the place where you keep your Enzyme configuration.

global.sinonSandbox = sinon.createSandbox(); afterEach(function() { return global.sinonSandbox.restore(); });

Jest

We have a similar approach here with setupFilesAfterEnv . This option tells Jest which file(s) to run before each test. Put this into package.json :

{ "name": "my-project", "jest": { "verbose": true, "setupFilesAfterEnv": ["<rootDir>/test_helpers/test_setup.js"] } }

Sidenote: this doesn’t exactly match the behavior of the Mocha configuration. Now we create a sandbox before each test, while earlier we created it only when Mocha first loaded the file. However, there should be no differences in the way you interact with Sinon in your tests.

Hooks

Mocha operates with a wide variety of hooks. We mostly used describe() , context() , it() , before() , after() , beforeEach() , and afterEach() .

Jest uses a bit different naming, in general, you’re safe to replace:

before ➡️ beforeAll

after ➡️ afterAll

context doesn’t have an equivalent in Jest, so I decided to use describe . You can find & replace all occurrences of context , before , and after or put the following code into test_helpers/test_setup.js :

// mocha keyword mappings window.context = describe; window.before = beforeAll; window.after = afterAll;

Function parameters

With Mocha, you were able to give hooks a description:

beforeEach(description, fn) afterEach(description, fn)

in Jest, hooks only accept a function and an optional timeout:

beforeEach(fn, timeout) afterEach(fn, timeout)

To strip out the descriptions from every beforeEach run the following regular expression in your editor:

beforeEach\([^(]*

and replace it with

beforeEach(

Babel

Mocha

We set up Babel in test_helpers/babel_loader.js :

// Run before any test files are loaded to use Babel for subsequent parsing require('@babel/register')({ ignore: [/node_modules\//], extensions: ['.js', '.jsx', '.ts', '.tsx'], });

Jest

Install babel-jest :

yarn add --dev babel-jest

and add the following to package.json :

// A map from regular expressions to paths to transformers transform: { '^.+\\.[t|j]sx?$': 'babel-jest', }

See more on using Babel with Jest.

Conclusion

At this point, you’re pretty much ready to run the tests with Jest.

What I liked about Jest is the simple configuration and the “work great by default” philosophy.

When you install Jest in a new package and run it, it’ll give you a meaningful output:

% jest No tests found, exiting with code 1 Run with `--passWithNoTests` to exit with code 0 In /Users/akoskm/Projects/test 2 files checked. testMatch: **/__tests__/**/*.[jt]s?(x), **/?(*.)+(spec|test).[tj]s?(x) - 0 matches testPathIgnorePatterns: /node_modules/ - 2 matches testRegex: - 0 matches Pattern: - 0 matches

It doesn’t ask for configuration files or necessary parameters it just works.

This is different from how we used to interact with libraries and, in my opinion, a philosophy we should follow when building new tools.

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