I joined a small software company last year to see what type of awesome a team of focused and talented developers could create. The product we work on is web based and for the first time in almost 2 years I found myself writing javascript again. If you had asked me about javascript 5 years ago I would have said something snarky like seriously ... javascript.
But something was different this time around, instead of throwing alerts around to see how stuff worked the team I joined was writing unit tests with this awesome library called jasmine. And for the first time in my professional software career this amazing thing happend ... I wasn't afraid to change my javascript code. Unlike my past javascript experience where I would write some code and pray no one would ever need to modify it, I could freely modify it and within a few seconds know if any behavior had changed.
Since the tests had to run against some type of javascript vm I just assumed we would need to open a browser and kick off the tests with each change. But thankfully I didn't establish how the team would be running unit tests. We instead run all our javascript unit tests from the command line with the help of a simple npm package called jasmine-node.
To install jasmine-node you will first need to have a recent version of node installed (assuming you want to run these tests on your local developer machines that is).
For anyone running OSX I'd recommend using brew because it works and it's low friction.
For anyone running Ubuntu I'd just pull down my chef recipe for developer machines and run the installer. This recipe could also be used on your ci server if you want to run these tests with each checkin (jenkins support is a cake walk because it's a simple command line utility).
Now that you have node installed you will need to install the jasmine-node package using npm. In the past I would have installed this globally but it's usually not a good idea to install anything globally. Instead we will keep this in your local directory to isolate yourself from the global node /npm code on the system.
npm install jasmine-node
If the above fails you might need to run it as sudo depending on how you installed node + npm on your system. After the install is complete you will notice a directory called node_modules was added to your project (add this to the .gitignore as it shouldn't be added to source control in any way).
If you are working on a team like I am you will want to checkin a simple file called 'packages.json' that looks like the below. That way other developers who don't yet have jasmine-node installed can just pull down the repository and do 'npm install'
Now you should have everything you need installed to write your first javascript unit test. Create a new js test file (be sure it has .spec.js as the extension so the test runner can find it /run it correctly).
Because the jasmine-node test runner actually lives inside the node_modules folder we installed earlier with npm, we can either point to it or create a symlink to run it shorthand (I prefer the symlink myself).
sudo ln -sf ~/projects/yourapphere/node_modules/jasmine-node/bin/jasmine-node /usr/local/bin/jasmine-node
Now you can run the javascript unit test we added above with node and jasmine-node using the simple command 'jasmine-node hello.spec.js'
