Testing your routes is important, and provides a way to ensure that you're providing the expected response from the API. As mentioned in a previous lecture, the tool we'll use to this is Chai-Http. Chai Http will allow us to start up the server and make a request to our routes.
We'll start by installing the necessary NPM modules and creating an Express app with a single GET route.
npm init -y
npm install express body-parser --save
npm install chai chai-http --save-dev
npm install -g mochaserver.js:
const express = require('express');
const app = express();
app.get('/', (req, res) => {
res.status(200).send('Testing routes is awesome!');
});
app.listen(3000, () => {
console.log('Server is listening on port 3000...');
})
module.exports = app;At the end of the file, we're exporting our app. This will allow us to require it in our test file(s). We'll create server.spec.js.
server.spec.js:
const chai = require('chai');
const chaiHttp = require('chai-http');
const server = require('./server');
const expect = chai.expect;
chai.use(chaiHttp);
describe('Routes', () => {
describe('/', () => {
it('should respond with a 200 when successful', (done) => {
chai.request(server)
.get('/')
.end((err, res) => {
expect(err).to.be.null;
expect(res).to.have.status(200);
done();
});
});
it('should respond with the correct message', (done) => {
chai.request(server)
.get('/')
.end((err, res) => {
expect(err).to.be.null;
expect(res).to.be.html;
expect(res.text).to.equal('Testing routes is awesome!')
done();
});
});
});
});To test your app, you will use the following:
mocha server.spec.jsUsing chai-http gives Chai the ability to make HTTP requests to our server, which we pass in as the argument to the chai.http file. Next, we'll test a named route: /tacos (because of course). We'll need to add 1 additional test to ensure the result we're getting from the server is what we expect.
server.js:
const express = require('express');
const app = express();
app.get('/', (req, res) => {
res.status(200).send('Testing routes is awesome!');
});
app.get('/tacos', (req, res) => {
res.status(200).send('Are delicious!');
});
app.listen(3000, () => {
console.log('Server is listening on port 3000...');
})
module.exports = app;server.spec.js:
const chai = require('chai');
const chaiHttp = require('chai-http');
const server = require('./server');
const expect = chai.expect;
chai.use(chaiHttp);
describe('Routes', () => {
describe('/', () => {
it('should respond with a 200 when successful', (done) => {
chai.request(server)
.get('/')
.end((err, res) => {
expect(err).to.be.null;
expect(res).to.have.status(200);
done();
});
});
it('should respond with the correct message', (done) => {
chai.request(server)
.get('/')
.end((err, res) => {
expect(err).to.be.null;
expect(res).to.be.html;
expect(res.text).to.equal('Testing routes is awesome!')
done();
});
});
});
describe('/tacos', () => {
it('should respond with a 200 when successful', (done) => {
chai.request(server)
.get('/tacos')
.end((err, res) => {
expect(err).to.be.null;
expect(res).to.have.status(200);
done();
});
});
it('should respond with the correct message', (done) => {
chai.request(server)
.get('/tacos')
.end((err, res) => {
expect(err).to.be.null;
expect(res).to.be.html;
expect(res.text).to.equal('Are delicious!')
done();
});
});
});
});We can also test other HTTP verbs, so let's see an example of what that looks like:
server.js:
const express = require('express');
const bodyParser = require('body-parser');
const app = express();
app.use(bodyParser.json());
app.get('/', (req, res) => {
res.status(200).send('Testing routes is awesome!');
});
app.post('/', (req, res) => {
res.status(200).json(req.body);
});
app.get('/tacos', (req, res) => {
res.status(200).send('Are delicious!');
});
app.get('*', (req, res) => {
res.status(404).send('Invalid URL');
});
app.listen(3000, () => {
console.log('Server is listening on port 3000...');
})
module.exports = app;server.spec.js:
const chai = require('chai');
const chaiHttp = require('chai-http');
const server = require('./server');
const expect = chai.expect;
chai.use(chaiHttp);
describe('Routes', () => {
describe('/', () => {
describe('GET', () => {
it('should respond with a 200 when successful', (done) => {
chai.request(server)
.get('/')
.end((err, res) => {
expect(err).to.be.null;
expect(res).to.have.status(200);
done();
});
});
it('should respond with the correct message', (done) => {
chai.request(server)
.get('/')
.end((err, res) => {
expect(err).to.be.null;
expect(res).to.be.html;
expect(res.text).to.equal('Testing routes is awesome!')
done();
});
});
});
describe('POST', () => {
it('should respond with a 200 when successful', (done) => {
chai.request(server)
.post('/')
.send({ food: 'tacos' })
.end((err, res) => {
expect(err).to.be.null;
expect(res).to.have.status(200);
done();
});
});
it('should respond the same object that was submitted', (done) => {
chai.request(server)
.post('/')
.send({ food: 'tacos' })
.end((err, res) => {
expect(err).to.be.null;
expect(res).to.be.json;
expect(res.body).to.deep.equal({ food: 'tacos' });
done();
});
});
});
});
describe('/tacos', () => {
it('should respond with a 200 when successful', (done) => {
chai.request(server)
.get('/tacos')
.end((err, res) => {
expect(err).to.be.null;
expect(res).to.have.status(200);
done();
});
});
it('should respond with the correct message', (done) => {
chai.request(server)
.get('/tacos')
.end((err, res) => {
expect(err).to.be.null;
expect(res).to.be.html;
expect(res.text).to.equal('Are delicious!')
done();
});
});
});
describe('Error', () => {
it('should respond with a 404 when an invalid url is used', (done) => {
chai.request(server)
.get('/notarealurl')
.end((err, res) => {
expect(err).to.not.be.null;
expect(res).to.have.status(404);
expect(res.text).to.equal('Invalid URL');
done();
});
});
});
});There are two common options for storing tests:
- Store them within a
testsfolder in the root of the project - Store them next to the functional files you're testing and add a
.spec.jssuffix to the filename
Both of those options are valid. If the application is smaller, I prefer a separate tests directory. However, if the application is large, I prefer the tests to be in the same directory as the functional files.