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Probably the most important tool, when developing a JavaScript application,
is Grunt. All steps, that are needed to verify, test and
build the application, are defined as grunt-tasks. To see a list of
available tasks, simply execute grunt --help:
$ grunt --help
Available tasks
simplemocha Run tests with mocha *
jshint Validate files with JSHint. *
watch Run predefined tasks whenever watched files change.
karma Run browser unit- and integration-tests with karma. *
server Start the server for testing purposes. When used directly from
command-line, be sure to specify the '--wait' option. Otherwise
the process will exit immediately.
travis Alias for "jshint", "simplemocha", "karma:unit", "server",
"karma:integration" tasks.
dev Alias for "server", "watch" tasks.
The configuration for all tasks lies in the Gruntfile.js. Custom tasks are loaded from the tasks directory.
Some tasks are in fact multitasks. To execute only a single substep of a multitask, use ":" as separator. At the moment only jshint and karma are multitasks. The subtasks are: jshint:server, jshint:servertest, jshint:gruntfile, jshint:client, jshint:karmaIntegration and jshint:karmaUnit for jshint and karma:unit and karma:integration for karma
The most important grunt-tasks are travis and dev (in fact, these two include all other available tasks), but it can be useful to know about the other ones, too.
This task is executed during a build on Travis-CI. The following steps are performed:
The dev-task is the most important task during local development. It has two functions:
$ grunt dev Running "server" task DEBUG: Running node-supervisor with DEBUG: program 'server/server.js' ... Running "watch" task Express server listening on port 3000 Activated neo4j auto-indexing Added property type to neo4j auto-indexing. ...
Executes the unit-tests for server-side code. The unit-tests are in the test/server directory. The simplemocha task uses a simple console-reporter. Unfortunately, the log-output of the server-code is also directly written to the console. This makes it difficult to detect test-errors, but it is the easiest way to make all necessary information available during Travis-CI runs (note, that only console-output is archived for Travis-CI runs).
$ grunt simplemocha
Running "simplemocha:all" (simplemocha) task
getMovie
◦ should return an empty list when neo returns null: [2013-10-06 19:21:49.369] [DEBUG] routes/movies - Retrieving a list of all movies
[2013-10-06 19:21:49.370] [DEBUG] routes/movies - Successfully loaded 0 movies.
✓ should return an empty list when neo returns null
...
4 passing (21ms)
The jshint tasks runs static code on all files. With the available subtasks, you can run static code analysis only on specific code files.
$ grunt jshint Running "jshint:server" (jshint) task >> 6 files lint free. Running "jshint:servertest" (jshint) task >> 2 files lint free. Running "jshint:gruntfile" (jshint) task >> 1 file lint free. Running "jshint:client" (jshint) task >> 2 files lint free. Running "jshint:karmaIntegration" (jshint) task >> 1 file lint free. Running "jshint:karmaUnit" (jshint) task >> 1 file lint free. Done, without errors.
Watch for file changes and execute the tasks jshing, simplemocha and karma:unit whenever a file is changed.
$ grunt watch Running "watch" task Waiting...OK >> File "server/app.js" changed. Running "jshint:server" (jshint) task ... Running "simplemocha:all" (simplemocha) task ... Running "karma:unit" (karma) task ... Done, without errors. Completed in 2.105s at Sun Oct 06 2013 19:47:50 GMT+0200 (CEST) - Waiting...
The server task starts a NodeJS server running the movie-database application. If used directly from command-line (and not from within other tasks), be sure to add the --wait option. Otherwise grunt will exit and the server will be shutdown immediately.
The server-tasks is used for three purposes: First, the travis task include a call to the server task to start the application for the end-to-end tests. Second, the dev-task uses it to start the server for local development. And last, you can use it directly from command-line (with the --wait option), if you do not want the overhead of the dev task.
$ grunt server --wait Running "server" task ... Express server listening on port 3000 ...
Execute tests using karma. By default karma uses PhantomJS as (headless) browser. The test-results are printed to console. The karma-configuration-files are located in test/karma.
If you want to debug karma-tests, you can use the --debug option. With this option, the tests will be executed using the Chrome-browser. Moreover, karma will not exit after the first test-run, but the browser will remain open instead. If you click the "Debug" button, you can use your browser's debugger to execute your tests step by step.
There are two subtasks:
test/karma/unit directory. The test-framework in use is simplemocha. If you debug these tests, the browser-window will remain blank. Take a look at the JavaScript console of your browser to see the test results.