Running JavaScript unit tests headlessly in a Continuous Integration build
As I managed to come up with a solution myself, I thought it would be a good idea to share it. The approach might not be flawless, but it's the first one that seemed to work. Feel free to post improvements and suggestions.
What I did in a nutshell:
- Launch an instance of Xvfb, a virtual framebuffer
- Using JsTestDriver:
- launch an instance of Firefox into the virtual framebuffer (headlessly)
- capture the Firefox instance and run the test suite
- generate JUnit-compliant test results .XML
- Use Bamboo to inspect the results file to pass or fail the build
I will next go through the more detailed phases. This is what my my directory structure ended up looking like:
lib/ JsTestDriver.jartest/ qunit/ equiv.js QUnitAdapter.js jsTestDriver.conf run_js_tests.sh tests.jstest-reports/build.xml
On the build server:
- Install Xvfb (
apt-get install Xvfb
) - Install Firefox (
apt-get install firefox
)
Into your application to be built:
- Install JsTestDriver: http://code.google.com/p/js-test-driver/
- add the QUnit adapters
equiv.js
andQUnitAdapter.js
- configure JsTestDriver (
jsTestDriver.conf
):
- add the QUnit adapters
server: http://localhost:4224load:# Load QUnit adapters (may be omitted if QUnit is not used) - qunit/equiv.js - qunit/QUnitAdapter.js # Tests themselves (you'll want to add more files) - tests.js
Create a script file for running the unit tests and generating test results (example in Bash, run_js_tests.sh
):
#!/bin/bash# directory to write output XML (if this doesn't exist, the results will not be generated!)OUTPUT_DIR="../test-reports"mkdir $OUTPUT_DIRXVFB=`which Xvfb`if [ "$?" -eq 1 ];then echo "Xvfb not found." exit 1fiFIREFOX=`which firefox`if [ "$?" -eq 1 ];then echo "Firefox not found." exit 1fi$XVFB :99 -ac & # launch virtual framebuffer into the backgroundPID_XVFB="$!" # take the process IDexport DISPLAY=:99 # set display to use that of the xvfb# run the testsjava -jar ../lib/JsTestDriver.jar --config jsTestDriver.conf --port 4224 --browser $FIREFOX --tests all --testOutput $OUTPUT_DIRkill $PID_XVFB # shut down xvfb (firefox will shut down cleanly by JsTestDriver)echo "Done."
Create an Ant target that calls the script:
<target name="test"> <exec executable="cmd" osfamily="windows"> <!-- This might contain something different in a Windows environment --> </exec> <exec executable="/bin/bash" dir="test" osfamily="unix"> <arg value="run_js_tests.sh" /> </exec></target>
Finally, tell the Bamboo build plan to both invoke the test
target and look for JUnit test results. Here the default "**/test-reports/*.xml"
will do fine.
For anyone interested in running their Jasmine BDD specs headlessly in maven, you might be interested in the jasmine-maven-plugin I maintain:
As an alternative, you could also try TestSwarm. I've got it up and running using QUnit to run my JS tests.