Question

I have a web app where the client side stuff is written with coffeescript and loaded with require.js.

I would like to be able to isolate and test this stuff using a node based test runner such as expresso (although other suggestions are welcome) so that I can integrate the client side testing with our CI server – which is currently Team City.

Here’s my directory set up:

.
├── coffee
│   ├── models
│   ├── node_modules
│   │   └── expresso
│   ├── spec
│   ├── tests
│   └── views
├── static
│   └── js
│       ├── lib
│       ├── models
│       ├── tests
│       └── views

These are hooked up using require.js like so:

deps = [
   "lib/backbone", "models/websocket_collection", "/static/js/lib/date.js"
]

define(deps, (Backbone, ws) ->
    # module code and exports here

And loaded into the browser like so:

<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8" async="" data-requirecontext="_" data-requiremodule="my_mod" src="/static/js/my_mod.js"></script>

In an idea world now I’d like to be able to have a test module that looks like:

{Model1, Model2} = require "models/some_module"

exports.test_a = ->
    assert.equal # etc etc

I have several problems (having not really used node server side except when I played with zombie.js)

1. How do I tell node where all of my plain javascript dependencies are (in static/js/lib) some of these are as downloaded, but backbone.js has been marked up with require.js define stuff like so

   define(function(require, exports, module) {
       (function(){
   

2. How do I actually run the tests? I’ve tried r.js (which as I understand it is supposed to be a bridge between browser side require and node’s require)

the problem I’m getting is:

ReferenceError: define is not defined

I’ve also tried to require(“allplugins-require”) which is the script I load browser side to collect all of my client code, but that seems to break node’s require.

• Is anybody doing this?
• If you’re not doing this how are you testing your code (bonus points for integration with CI)?
• Any alternatives to require.js for managing client side dependencies that might play a bit better on the server side?

I’d be very happy to hear alternative approaches that people are using.

Thanks,
Ben

Answer 1

I spent a long time trying to get this to work and eventually gave up. I did get it working, by referencing all of my require.js dependencies in a global variable and using that for the node.js tests, but the design was so ugly that I felt that I had defeated the point.

My current approach is:

• write my JavaScript modules as CommonJS modules
• Use the Jasmine BDD node integration to test my modules server-side
• Use stitch to make the CommonJS modules work client-side

This is working well for me, with the following caveats:

• Client-side debugging is difficult because stitch concatenates all my scripts. I found that leaving out libraries like jQuery from the stitch configuration helped with this.
• I don’t have any way to debug server-side. There is a node.js debugger but it has not worked with the last few versions of node.