I used to extensively use Jamine and Jasmine-Node for my JavaScript testing. While jasmine is great I’ve recently moved over to Mocha for several reasons but primarily because it supports coverage reporting.

Here are some basic steps to get going. There are several key components required, click on the different links and follow the installation instructions:

• node.js is the core JavaScript platform
• Mocha is the test framework
• node-jscoverage gives coverage support. You can also read TJ Holowaychuk’s article for more details Mocha test coverage
• Jenkins HTML Publisher Plugin will let you view the coverage report in Jenkins

Setting up coverage

Tests must be configured to run with the instrumented code so that coverage works. The coverage command creates the instrumented version of the code in the lib-cov directory:

jscoverage lib lib-cov

The tests need to use these files instead. When using RequireJS (or node.js) this can be done by modifying index.js and using an environment variable. Calling the environment variable APP_COVERAGE (which you would have to set before calling the tests) it would look something like this:

module.exports = process.env.APP_COVERAGE ? require('./lib-cov/app') : require('./lib/app');

If there are multiple modules in a directory you can do something like this:

var module1 = process.env.APP_COVERAGE ? require('./lib-cov/module1'): require('./lib/module1');
var module2 = process.env.APP_COVERAGE ? require('./lib-cov/module2'): require('./lib/module2');

module.exports = {
   module1: module1,
   module2: module2
};

Then in the tests you can just require the modules as appropriate:

var app = require('../../index.js');

or

var module1 = require('../../index.js').module1;

Using Makefile

I have a standard Makefile that I use for running builds

Here’s a breakdown of the tasks/rules:

• make test runs the tests and displays the results in the terminal. This is perfect for developer use
• make test-ci runs the tests and creates an xUnit format XML report
• make test-cov runs the tests and creates coverage report HTML file
• make test-all runs the test-ci and test-cov tasks creates both the xUnit format XML report and the HTML coverage report. This is perfect for CI use

Showing coverage in Jenkins

If you have installed the Jenkins HTML Publisher Plugin and are using the make test-all command, you can then configure Jenkins to use the generated HTML coverage report by adding the “Publish HTML reports” post build action and configuring it to use the coverage.html file.

Live example

You can see an example of a fully working project in my HttpFileServerJS project (please note that this is subject to outages):

HttpFileServerJS GitHub project

HttpFileServerJS Jenkins job