grunt-jasmine-firefoxaddon

Run jasmine specs in a Firefox Addon

Getting Started

This plugin requires Grunt ^0.4.5

If you haven't used Grunt before, be sure to check out the Getting Started guide, which explains how to create your grunt file. Once you're familiar with the process, this plugin can be installed as:

npm install grunt-jasmine-firefoxaddon --save-dev

Once the plugin has been installed, it may be enabled with this line of JavaScript:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-jasmine-firefoxaddon');

Jasmine Task

Run this task with the grunt jasmine_firefoxaddon command.

Automatically builds and maintains the spec runner and reports results back to the grunt console. Uses jpm provided by mozilla to run a dynamically constructed firefox addon that runs jasmine specs by using browserify. Allows for copying and loading of custom .jsm files. The addon is built in the .build/ path, but is deleted after the task successfully completes. If the task fails part way it will likely remain, and may be useful for debugging.

Note that if your addon needs to access other resources, you will need to make the files available (e.g. with grunt-contrib-copy) under the path .build/data/... and then access them in your addon with the path resource://grunt-jasmine-firefoxaddon-runner/data/... (you can also use self.data.url(...) if the self API is available to you). This is due to the structure of Firefox addons - future iterations of this tool may be able to make the process smoother.

Customize your SpecRunner

Use your own files in the app to customize your tests. For all of the below, you can use node globbing patterns.

Options

tests

Type: String|Array

The spec files you want to run.

resources

Type: String|Array

Resources (.js, .json, etc.) needed for the tests (will be made available to the addon under data/, but not automatically loaded into the addon - your tests can pull them in as needed from resource://grunt-jasmine-firefoxaddon-runner/data/). These files can be .jsm, which would allow them to be loaded via Components.utils.import, or they can be of other types (which will require different mechanisms to load, currently left as an exercise to the user - future updates to this tool may try to facilitate common use cases).

helpers

Type: String|Array

Custom JavaScript module (.jsm) files you wish you load into your addon during test. These files are automatically loaded during addon setup, but must be .jsm types (JavaScript with an EXPORTED_SYMBOLS array to define visibility).

options.timeout

Type: Number Default: 10000

How many milliseconds to wait for the browser to start up before failing.

Issues/debugging

Ideally this runner should "just work" with your tests - however, if it doesn't here are a few common issues and suggested approaches:

• The path where resources are (grunt-jasmine-firefoxaddon-runner/data/...) may conflict with the path you need to specify if you run your tests in other environments. In that case, you can put logic to set the Firefox-addon-specific path in a block like if (typeof window === 'undefined') { path = ... } - this assumes that window is defined in your other relevant environments (it isn't within the scope of a Firefox addon).
• If you're using freedom.js you need to ensure that your module actually loads and does something (e.g. emits a message from the WebWorker to the "front-end"). If it doesn't then the test runner may terminate prematurely and give fairly uninformative error messages like "error loading resource" (referring usually to some part of the freedom module). [This is an example of a minimal working freedom.js module] (https://github.com/trevj/grunt-jasmine-firefoxaddon-test/) for this runner.

If you encounter some other problem then feel free to file an issue in this GitHub repository.