fake-mocha

Run arbitrary commands instead of mocha to integrate with popular IDEs

Install

npm install --save-dev fake-mocha

What? Why?

If you're developing for a production platform, chances are you're either currently running your tests in a production-like virtual machine, container, or remote dev server, or you should be.

Popular IDEs such as those in the JetBrains family -- IntelliJ IDEA, WebStorm, PHPStorm, PyCharm, etc., have excellent mocha integration for Node.js projects, provided by the optional NodeJS plugin. It provides a fantastic interface for running and exploring the results of tests, jumping right to errors or test definitions when they're clicked on.

The problem is, that mocha integration is local-only. There's no way to configure a remote run in a Docker container or a Vagrant VM, and so you're sunk if your tests require a local database, a specific version of Node.js, or some other production-like dependency.

Using fake-mocha, you can configure the mocha integration to look into node_modules/fake-mocha instead of node_modules/mocha, and in the "Extra Mocha options" section, tell it to execute your own test script. For example, if you'd prefer mocha to run make test, just set those extra options to --command "make test". Fake-mocha will ignore all the other arguments and just run the command you gave it. It will also set the working directory to your project root, pass through stdio, and exit with the same exit status code as the command it executed.

Getting the mocha integration working

Running a different command is only half the battle, and that's what fake-mocha solves for you. It's up to you to invoke actual mocha in your dev environment, and pass it the IntelliJ mocha reporter provided by the IDE plugin. See the examples folder for a Makefile that will do exactly that to run your tests in the official 'node' Docker container.

License

fake-mocha is licensed under the MIT license. Please see LICENSE.txt for full details.

Credits

fake-mocha was created in a flurry of frustration at TechnologyAdvice.