Karma and Jasmin

Configuring karma + jasmin for our angular app

Introduction to tools

Karma is a test runner and it is a direct product from angularJS team. It provides flexibility to test your app in various browsers and is integrated with Jenkins, TravisCI and CircleCI continuous integration tools.

Jasmin is a test behavior driven development framework for testing javascript. It plays very well with karma. Similar to karma jasmin is also recommended as a framework of choice for AngularJS testing. Jasmin is dependency free.

Practical fun

The repo for AngularUnitTestDemo already has karma packages and its dependencies (karma-jasmine, jasmine-core, karma-chrome-launcher) so a simple npm command is sufficient to setup the project:

git clone https://github.com/Mohammed-Aadil/AngularUnitTestDemo
cd AngularUnitTestDemo
npm install

I have configured package.json to run bower install command on post install of npm packages. While npm is running, you can install karma command line tool in parallel, so open another terminal and run the following command:

npm install -g karma-cli

At this point we have installed karma and jasmin both. We are ready to create our karma configuration file so we can start writing tests. In a terminal, run the following command:

karma init

This command will ask you series of questions, just hit enter to accept defaults. At the end, it will generate a config file for karma: karma.conf. This file should look like:

module.exports = function(config) {
  config.set({
    basePath: '',
    frameworks: ['jasmine'],
    files: [
    ],
    exclude: [
    ],
    preprocessors: {
    },
    reporters: ['progress'],
    port: 9876,
    colors: true,
    logLevel: config.LOG_INFO,
    autoWatch: true,
    browsers: ['Chrome'],
    singleRun: false,
    concurrency: Infinity
  })
}

Note: do not forget to update the files field in karma.conf file for angular and its dependencies.