Option exclude certain files by pattern when testing recursively

[KylePDavis]

I would like the ability to provide an exclusion pattern so that I can only test files that match my test file pattern. This would allow data files to coexist with test files so long as they follow a reasonable pattern.

I think this would be simply providing an option that sets ignore option in glob.

Thoughts? I can make a PR for it real quick if you'd like.

[alinex]

You may better make two parallel directories, one for tests and the other
for data files. That's what I did.
Am 04.03.2015 15:52 schrieb "Kyle P Davis" notifications@github.com:

I would like the ability to provide an exclusion pattern so that I can
only test files that match my test file pattern. This would allow data
files to coexist with test files so long as they follow a reasonable
pattern.

I think this would be simply providing an option that sets ignore option
in glob.

Thoughts? I can make a PR for it real quick if you'd like.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#1577.

[KylePDavis]

I could (and have in the past) but I'd rather not have to do that anymore now that I've realized that glob ignore is right there.

It should be pretty easy to add a command line argument to set the glob ignore option. I just wanted to get thoughts and discuss a little bit first.

Any objections to me creating a PR for this?

[toddbluhm]

I was just needing this too and was surprised to see mocha did not already have it. I think it would be a great addition. We have a "testApp" inside our test folder that we use specifically for testing. We don't want mocha trying to run tests inside that folder. It would be nice to be able to just add an exclude to our mocha.opts file to exclude that specific path rather than having to explicitly include all the other test sub-folders we have.

While we could move the testApp out, it really doesn't fit anywhere else in the repo and its got relative pathing to certain files in the test folder.

This I think would be a nice addition. Certainly not critical, but helpful.

[boneskull]

@KylePDavis @toddbluhm

If I needed this, I think I'd probably just

$ mocha $(find test/ ! -path '*testApp*')

So I'm not really thrilled about the idea. I'm kind of on the fence about the existence of the recursive flag even, since the same thing can be achieved with a shell command, Makefile, Gruntfile.js, gulpfile.js, etc., etc.

[danielstjules]

I think @boneskull makes a good point - this is already achievable in a variety of ways. And that's not including the fact that you can structure you directories to avoid this altogether. For example, given this structure:

$ tree .
.
└── spec
    ├── fixtures
    ├── integration
    └── unit

4 directories, 0 files

You just update your package.json so that you can simply run npm test

  "scripts": {
    "test": "mocha spec/unit spec/integration"
  }

Or with a structure like the following:

$ tree .
.
└── src
    └── models
        ├── user.js
        └── userSpec.js

2 directories, 2 files

You could run specs in a similar fashion as @boneskull's example (this will only run files containing Spec)

  "scripts": {
    "test": "mocha $(find src -name '*Spec.js')"
  }

Edit: Fixed :)

[boneskull]

@danielstjules I think that will actually hit any dir with Spec in the name. Perhaps you want -name '*.spec.js'

[danielstjules]

Yup, you're right! Brainfart. Thanks for pointing that out.

Fixed command for the example:

  "scripts": {
    "test": "mocha $(find src -name '*Spec.js')"
  }

[cazzer]

I think there is still a valid use case for this feature: I tend to group my files by feature, so each test file is next to the files containing the logic they're testing. Naming test files consistently works with the file argument or grep option but I would like to explicitly ignore things like node_modules.

For anyone looking - gulp-mocha can achieve this, I just hate to include gulp where I don't have to.

[KrisSiegel]

I'd like to take a moment and +1 this idea. Unlike typical JavaScript projects I like to follow the way GO does unit testing and I include a spec file next to every single file that gets tested. For example a directory in one of my projects may look like the following:

main.js
main.spec.js
utilities.js
utilities.spec.js

I find this type of organization makes it far easier to find test versus digging into a single directory of test files; you always expect the test to sit right next to the file that it tests and my build script scripts all .spec.js files out in the deployed version.

Due to my non-standard layout what I'd like to be able to do is run all unit tests with all of my folders excluding the node_modules directory.

I don't have a Windows box near me at the moment but I'm not sure if that find syntax would work in Windows or not; an exclude option would be far more intuitive anyway in my opinion. Plus almost all unit test frameworks include a way of ignoring files anyway so parity would be nice.

[op1ekun]

Hi, all my tests support *.test.js format. They are all in tests directory. Currently I have couple of tests that I want to exclude, and still retain the default path for mocha which is ./test/**/*.js. How do I do that?

Creating two separate directories will not work here, and you have to agree that moving tests between to directories would create a lot of noise in VCS.

@calebthebrewer Thankfully I'm using gulp in the project ;) thanks for the hint!

[datatypevoid]

+1 @calebthebrewer

[datatypevoid]

Angular 2.0 and Polymer have me in component mode so I agree with @KrisSiegel. Keeping all of your code in bundles keeps a clean, modular, easy-to-maintain file hierarchy.

[datatypevoid]

Is there any foreseeable problem to loading the tests using the q promise library in a fashion such as this:

import q from 'q';

import authRouterTest from '../app/routes/_authentication.router.e2e.js';

import productRouterTest from '../app/routes/_product.router.e2e.js';

import productModelTest from '../app/models/product.model.spec.js';

// Dynamically constructed sequence of functions
let funcs = [ productModelTest(), authRouterTest(), productRouterTest() ];

// This function takes an array of promise-producing functions and
// runs them sequentially.
let execTests = () => {

    let result = q();

    funcs.forEach((f) => {

        result = result.then(f);
    });

    return result;
};

// Execute tests
execTests();

This way you can import your files from wherever and just have one test file in test/.

You can resolve the promise within the last test block and wrap each test up like this

import q from 'q'

export default () => {

    let Q = q.defer();

    describe('something', () => {

        it('should', (done) => {

            ...
        });
    });

    describe('something', () => {

        it('should', (done) => {

            ...
        });

        it('should', (done) => {

            ...

            Q.resolve('test complete');
        });
    });

    return Q.promise;
};

It seems to work pretty good, unless there is something I am not considering.