mockra

Including the database layer into my Node tests was one of the more daunting tasks at first glance, but ended up being much simpler than I first expected. I’m not thrilled with my approach, but it works, and has gotten me past the hump of testing my node applications.

The first step is including my express app through a common.js file, which you can read more about here. This prevents mongoose from generating an error by attempting to connect to the same mongo instance multiple times. The downside is that we’re loading our app for all of our tests using common.js.

The next step is cleaning up after our tests, which I like to do explicitly in each test file. This allows better awareness of the state you’re setting up in each test, as well as the performance impact. You can do so with the following code:

  var Post = require('../../models/post'

  after(function(done) {
    Post.remove().exec()
    done()
  })

You will want to switch Post with whatever mongoose model you need to clean up. This specific example will clear the post collection after all of the tests in the block have run. This can be replaced with afterEach if you need to clean up between each spec.