jasmine-headless-webkit/index.md
2011-10-24 11:18:39 -04:00

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jasmine-headless-webkit -- The fastest way to run your Jasmine specs! default

Jasmine Headless WebKit

Run your Jasmine specs at sonic boom speed!

Colored Output [Jasmine](http://pivotal.github.com/jasmine/) is great. I love it. But running Jasmine when you need to test code that will run in a browser environment can be problematic and slow:
  • The Jasmine gem's server makes getting up and testing very fast, but F5-ing your browser for each test run is distracting.
  • Jasmine CI uses Selenium, which speeds up the process a bit, but you're still rendering pixels in a browser, albeit with the option of rendering those pixels in a lot of different browsers at once.
  • Node.js, EnvJS, and Rhino solutions for running Jasmine are great for anything that will never run in a real browser. I'm a big believer of running code destined for a browser in a browser itself, not a simulator.
  • Evergreen makes Jasmine testing in a Rails app as easy as pie, but not everyone writes for Rails.

But there's a solution for fast, accurate browser-based testing. with a focus on continuous testing, using one of the most popular browser cores, and that dovetails perfectly into the Jasmine gem's already established protocols.

Enter jasmine-headless-webkit

jasmine-headless-webkit uses the QtWebKit widget to run your specs without needing to render a pixel. It's nearly as fast as running in a JavaScript engine like Node.js, and, since it's a real browser environment, all the modules you would normally use, like jQuery and Backbone.js, work without any modifications. If you write your tests correctly, they'll even work when running in the Jasmine gem's server with no changes to your code.

jasmine-headless-webkit also streamlines your workflow in other ways:

  • It integrates with Guard for a continuous testing setup when using guard-jasmine-headless-webkit.
  • It compiles CoffeeScript, both for your tests and for your application logic.
  • It can be configured like RSpec, and its output is very similar to RSpec's output, so you don't need to learn too much new stuff to use and integrate it.
  • It provides cleaner debugging and backtrace output than a lot of other console-based test tools provide.
  • It's fast.

Is this for me?

That depends on what you need:

  • If you're new to JavaScript testing, drop in Pivotal's Jasmine gem and point your browser at http://localhost:8888/.
  • If you're used to how the Jasmine gem works and want to move to a faster solution geared toward continuous testing, you're in the right place!
  • If you want an even simpler config and access to all of your Rails routes and resources for a quasi-intergration testing setup, use Evergreen. You even get your choice of browser drivers for free (as opposed to just Selenium or WebKit) as well as headless testing!
  • If you want true integration testing, where you test the whole application stack, use Cucumber and/or Capybara.
  • If you're not using Rails and still want to unit test, the Jasmine gem or jasmine-headless-webkit is what you want.

'round here, we focus on unit testing and mocking external interfaces. No using your app's views or routes, no hitting the app server to get resources, just mocking and stubbing.

How do I use this wonderful toy?

You can use it standalone:

gem install jasmine-headless-webkit

Or you can use it with Bundler:

gem 'jasmine-headless-webkit'

However you install it, you'll get a jasmine-headless-webkit executable. You'll also need to set up your project to use the Jasmine gem:

gem install jasmine
jasmine init

Once you're good enough, you can make the spec/javascripts/support/jasmine.yml file yourself and skip the Pivotal Jasmine gem entirely. It's what the cool kids do.

What do I need to get it working?

Installation requires Qt 4.7. jasmine-headless-webkit has been tested in the following environments:

  • Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7, with MacPorts Qt, Homebrew Qt and Nokia Qt.mpkg
  • Kubuntu 110.04, 10.10 and 10.04
  • Ubuntu 11.04 and 9.10
  • Arch Linux

If it works in yours, leave me a message on GitHub or fork this site and add your setup.

Qt 4.7.X

The gem is compiled using qt4-qmake and you will need Qt 4.7.x or greater. The version you have installed should be detected correctly, and the appropriate message for installing Qt should be given if it's wrong. If it's not, please file a new issue!

Manually checking the Qt version

Test that qt4-qmake it is installed and verify your version. qmake --version

If you have the Qt 4.7.x or greater, you are ready to install jasmine-headless-webkit. QMake version 2.01a Using Qt version 4.7.2 in /usr/lib

If you receive a different message, you can install qt4-qmake using one of the following commands as root:

Ubuntu 11.04

{% highlight bash %} sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev sudo apt-get install qt4-qmake sudo update-alternatives --config qmake # and select Qt 4's qmake {% endhighlight %}

Ubuntu 9.10

Running sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev and sudo apt-get install qt4-qmake will install qt4, but it installs version 4.5.2, which will not be able to compile jasmine-headless-webkit, as it requires Qt 4.7.X or greater.

You will need to compile qt4-qmake from source Qt version 4.7.0. There are excellent directions on how to compile the source code. You will need to ensure Qt is exported to your $PATH before using qmake, as the source code will install to /usr/local/Trolltech/.

Mac OS X 10.6 & 10.7

MacPorts

{% highlight bash %} sudo port install qt4-mac {% endhighlight %}

Homebrew

{% highlight bash %} brew install qt {% endhighlight %}

(you may need to use --build-from-source on Lion)

My OS isn't on here!

capybara-webkit has the best instructions for installing Qt on various other systems that may not be covered here.

How does it work?

jasmine-headless-webkit generates a static HTML file that includes the Jasmine JavaScript library from the Jasmine gem, your application and spec files, and any helpers you may need. The runner then creates a WebKit widget that loads the HTML file, runs the tests, and grabs the results of the test to show back to you. Awesome!

jasmine-headless-webkit uses the same jasmine.yml file that the Jasmine gem uses to define where particular files for the testing process are located:

{% highlight yaml %} src_files:

  • public/assets/common.js
  • public/assets/templates.js
  • public/javascripts/models/**/*.js
  • public/javascripts/collections/**/*.js
  • public/javascripts/views/**/*.js
  • app/coffeescripts/models/**/*.coffee
  • app/coffeescripts/collections/**/*.coffee
  • app/coffeescripts/views/**/*.coffee helpers:
  • helpers/**/*.{js,coffee} spec_files:
  • "**/*[Ss]pec.{js,coffee}" src_dir: spec_dir: spec/javascripts {% endhighlight %}

It also brings in the same copy of the Jasmine library that the Jasmine gem includes, so if you're testing in both environments, you're guaranteed to get the same results in your tests.

Caching, caching, caching

jasmine-headless-webkit does two things that are CPU intensive (besides running tests): compiling CoffeeScript and analyzing spec files to get line number information for nicer spec failure messages (did I mention you get really nice spec failure messages with jasmine-headless-webkit, too?). These two operations are cached into the .jhw-cache/ folder from where the runner is executed. When this cache is combined with running tests continuously using Guard, runtime overhead is reduced to almost nothing.

Of course, being a cache, it takes time to warm up. The first time you run jasmine-headless-webkit on a big project, it can take several seconds to warm the cache. After that, enjoy an almost 20% speedup in runtime (tested on exactly one project's runtime, YMMV). This is new as of 0.7.0.

*.coffee in my jasmine.yml file?!

Yes, jasmine-headless-webkit will support *.coffee files in jasmine.yml, which the normal Jasmine server currently does not support out of the box. Once there's official support, you'll be able to easily switch between jasmine-headless-webkit and the Jasmine test server when you're using CoffeeScript. CoffeeScript files are compiled and injected into the generated HTML files.

Never done Jasmine in CoffeeScript? It looks like this:

{% highlight coffeescript %} describe 'Component', -> describe 'StorylineNode', -> model = null

beforeEach ->
  model = new ComponentStorylineNode({id: 1})

it 'should not be new', ->
  expect(model.isNew()).toEqual(false)

{% endhighlight %}

...and it turns into this...

{% highlight js %} describe('Component', function() { return describe('StorylineNode', function() { var model; model = null; beforeEach(function() { return model = new ComponentStorylineNode({ id: 1 }); }); return it('should not be new', function() { return expect(model.isNew()).toEqual(false); }); }); }); {% endhighlight %}

Server interaction

Since there's no Jasmine server running, there's no way to grab test files from the filesystem via Ajax. If you need to test server interaction, do one of the following:

  • Stub your server responses using Sinon.JS, the recommended way.
  • Use PhantomJS against a running copy of a Jasmine server, instead of this project.

Vendored JavaScript support

(still in development!)

You can pull in vendored JavaScript files as helpers in your setup! Add the vendored_helpers section to your jasmine.yml file with the names of some helpers you want to use (take a look at jasmine-spec-extras to see how it works):

{% highlight yaml %} vendored_helpers:

  • 'sinon' {% endhighlight %}

This is the first step in an effort to intergrate with Sprockets directly to make testing modern Rails apps as seamless as possible. Oh yeah, it's coming!

What else works?

alert() and confirm() work, though the latter always returns true. You should be mocking calls to confirm(), of course:

{% highlight js %} spyOn(window, 'confirm').andReturn(false) {% endhighlight %}

console.log() also works. It uses one of three methods for serializing what you've provided:

  • If the object given responds to toJSON, jasmine-headless-webkit uses JSON.stringify(object.toJSON()).
  • If the object is a jQuery object, it is serialized with jQuery('<div>').append(object).html() and pretty-printed using the HTML beautifier from JS Beautifier.
  • If none of these apply, it uses a hacked-up version of jsDump that ignores Functions on objects and prevents cyclical references.

If you need a heavy-weight object printer, you also have console.pp(), which uses Jasmine's built-in pretty-printer if available, and falls back to JSON.stringify() if it's not.

You also get an additional method, console.peek(), which calls console.log() with the provided parameter, then passes the parameter back along so you can continue to work with it. It's the equivalent of .tap { |o| p o } in Ruby.

Running the runner

{% highlight bash %} jasmine-headless-webkit [ -c / --colors ] [ --no-colors ] [ --no-full-run ] [ --keep ] [ -l / --list ] [ --report ] [ --runner-out <html file> ] [ -j / --jasmine-config ] {% endhighlight %}

The runner will return one of three exit codes:

  • 0 means your tests passed sucessfully.
  • 1 means you had a failure in your tests.
  • 2 means your tests passed, but you used console.log() somewhere.

Setting default options

Much like RSpec, you can define the default options for each run of the runner. Place your global options into a ~/.jasmine-headless-webkit file and your per-project settings in a .jasmine-headless-webkit file at the root of the project.

Listng what files jasmine-headless-webkit will include

If your tests are not picking up a file you thought they should be, or they're being included in the wrong order, run with the -l flag to get a list of the files that jasmine-headless-webkit will include in the generated HTML file.

Coloring the output

jasmine-headless-webkit will not color output by default. This makes it easier to integrate with CI servers. If you want colored output, use the -c flag. With colored output, your tests will look like this:

Colored Output

If you have colors turned on globally, you can turn them off per-project or per-run with --no-colors.

Preserving compiled output on errors

CoffeeScript logic errors can be hard to track down. Keep the generated HTML files with the --keep flag and you'll get specrunner.$$.html files in your working directory.

Writing out a machine-readable report

Use the --report option to create a detailed report file:

PASS||Statement||One||file.js:23
FAIL||Statement||Two||file.js:23
CONSOLE||Yes
ERROR||Uh oh||file.js:23
TOTAL||1||2||3||T

guard-jasmine-headless-webkit uses this for the Growl notifications. You can also use it in your own setups, to run specs remotely and stick the results into a CI system. You can use Jasmine::Headless::Report to interpret the file and transform the output.

Using a different jasmine.yml file

If for some reason you're not using the default path for a jasmine.yml file (which is spec/javascripts/support/jasmine.yml), you can provide that path with -j.

Running only certain spec files

By default, if no files are passed into jasmine-headless-webkit, all possible spec files in the spec_files definition will be run. You can limit the run to only certain files by passing those to jasmine-headless-webkit:

{% highlight bash %} jasmine-headless-webkit spec/javascripts/models/node_viewer.coffee {% endhighlight %}

Filtered runs and full runs

Typically, targeted spec running is done by a tool like Guard, and the order of running goes like this:

  • Run the filtered spec
    • If it fails, stop processing and alert the user
    • If it succeeds, run all specs and alert on success or failure

Having your test running tool re-run jasmine-headless-webkit is fast, but there's still the cost of instantiating QtWebKit and Ruby with each run. Versions of jasmine-headless-webkit 0.3.0 and greater will do this for you, keeping the widget in memory and running Jasmine tests on first the filtered suite, and then the complete suite. The results you'll get are for the last run that's executed, which is typically what you want to know anyway. Newer versions of guard-jasmine-headless-webkit also support this behavior. This trims valuable seconds off of testing with every run, saving you enough time every day to run to the coffee shop and get some delicious brew!

If you don't want this behavior, pass in --no-full-run and filtered runs will be the only thing that runs when you request one.

Writing the HTML runner to another location

If you want to use the runner file in other places, use the --runner-out parameter with the name of the target file. The HTML produced uses the Jasmine HtmlReporter if not loaded in jasmine-headless-webkit, so you should be able to just open it in a browser and have it work.

If you always want the reporter written to a particular location, you can define that location in jasmine.yml:

{% highlight yaml %} runner_output: "runner.html" {% endhighlight %}

Running the runner from a Ruby program

You can call the runner from Ruby:

{% highlight ruby %} require 'jasmine-headless-webkit'

status_code = Jasmine::Headless::Runner.run( :colors => false, #=> true to get colors :remove_html_file => true, #=> false to keep specrunners on failure :jasmine_config => 'spec/javascripts/support/jasmine.yml', #=> run a different config :report => false, #=> filename if a report file should be written :full_run => true, #=> false to not run a full run after a targeted run :files => ['file_one_spec.js', 'file_two_spec.coffee'] #=> files to use for a targeted run, [] to run all ) {% endhighlight %}

Automated testing during development

jasmine-headless-webkit works best when it's running all the time, re-running tests when you update the appropriate files. If you use Guard, install guard-jasmine-headless-webkit and run guard init jasmine-headless-webkit to add the necessary bits to your Guardfile to test a Rails 3.1 (or a well-structured Rails 3.0) app.

Rails 3.1 and the Asset Pipeline

Since your JS code can now flow through the Rails 3.1 asset pipeline, and since it's not easy for non-Rails apps to get access to that pipeline, testing your pipelined code in Rails 3.1 is a bit more difficult. The best way is to regenrate your code with each change and then run jasmine-headless-webkit on the code, and now, there's a Guard for that! guard-rails-assets will watch your app's code for changes and rebuild your pipelined JS code, ready to be tested with jasmine-headless-webkit:

{% highlight ruby %} guard 'rails-assets' do watch(%r{^app/assets/javascripts/(.*).(js|coffee)$}) end

guard 'jasmine-headless-webkit' do watch(%r{^public/assets/..js$}) watch(%r{^spec/javascripts/..coffee$}) end {% endhighlight %}

Jammit for JS templates

If you like to use Jammit to shove together your JS templates into one file, you can use a Guard for that, too! guard-jammit provides Jammit watching support, but the current version (as of 2011-06-18) does not support some changes to Jammit's internals. Use my fork until that gets fixed.

{% highlight ruby %} guard 'jammit' do watch(%r{^app/views/.*.jst$$}) end

guard 'jasmine-headless-webkit' do watch(%r{^public/assets/..js$}) watch(%r{^spec/javascripts/..coffee$}) end {% endhighlight %}

Autotest

Support for Autotest is deprecated and no new features will be added to the Autotest runners unless provided by other users.

Rake tasks

You can create a Rake task for your headless Jasmine specs:

{% highlight ruby %} require 'jasmine-headless-webkit'

Jasmine::Headless::Task.new('jasmine:headless') do |t| t.colors = true t.keep_on_error = true t.jasmine_config = 'this/is/the/path.yml' end {% endhighlight %}

If you've bundled jasmine-headless-webkit in with Rails, you'll also get a basic task for running your Jasmine specs. Be sure to include the gem in the development group so you get with a normal call to rake -T:

{% highlight ruby %} group :test, :development do gem 'jasmine-headless-webkit' end {% endhighlight %}

# rake -T

rake jasmine:headless     # Run Jasmine specs headlessly

This is the same as running jasmine-headless-webkit -c.

Continuous integration & testing using Xvfb

Since most continuous integration servers do not have a display, you will need to use Xvfb or virtual framebuffer Xserver for Version 11. If you elect not to use Xvfb, you will need to have a browser and graphical display to run jasmine-headless-webkit -c.

Reference: Xvfb Manpages

Install Xvfb

  sudo apt-get install xvfb

Resolve missing dependencies

To resolve missing dependencies, you will need to know what to install. $ Xvfb :99 -ac You will see a long list of warning messages:

 [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc,
 removing from list!
 [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic,
 removing from list!
 [dix] Could not init font path element 
 /usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/:unscaled, removing from list!
 [dix] Could not init font path element
  /usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/:unscaled, removing from list!
 [dix] Could not init font path element 
 /usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1, removing from list!
 [dix] Could not init font path element 
 /usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi, removing from list!
 [dix] Could not init font path element 
 /usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi, removing from list!
 sh: /usr/bin/xkbcomp: not found
 (EE) Error compiling keymap (server-42)
 (EE) XKB: Couldn't compile keymap
 [config/dbus] couldn't take over org.x.config:
 org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied 
 (Connection ":1.74" is not allowed to
 own the service "org.x.config.display99" 
 due to security policies in the configuration file)	

Installing the following packages would resolve the above warning messages. Your missing packages may be different depending on the packages you have installed. sudo apt-get install x11-xkb-utils sudo apt-get install xfonts-100dpi xfonts-75dpi sudo apt-get install xfonts-scalable xfonts-cyrillic sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-core

Once you have resolved these dependencies, you should see: [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc, removing from list! [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic, removing from list! [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/:unscaled, removing from list! [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/:unscaled, removing from list! [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1, removing from list! [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi, removing from list! [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi, removing from list!

Run with Xvfb

...as a Rake task

 xvfb-run rake jasmine:headless 
 # ...or...
 xvfb-run jasmine-headless-webkit -c

Reference: MARTIN DALE LYNESS

...seamlessly

First run Xvfb in the background:

Xvfb :0 -screen 0 1024x768x24 > /dev/null 2>&1 &

Then, set your DISPLAY to point at the Xvfb instance. Putting all this in your .bash_profile or equivalent startup script makes this a lot easier:

xdpyinfo -display :0 &>/dev/null && export DISPLAY=:0

See Paul Goscicki's post for more details on the setup. Thanks, Paul!

RubyMine

RubyMine may throw an error when running rake spec, you will need to provide a JavaScript runtime environment.

 rake aborted!
 Could not find a JavaScript runtime.
 See https://github.com/sstephenson/execjs
 for a list of available runtimes.

To resolve this problem, install and use the therubyracer gem, which is the embed V8 JavaScript interpreter into Ruby. Additionally, you can set the EXECJS_RUNTIME environment variable to a valid ExecJS runtime name.

export EXECJS_RUNTIME=Node

I have a problem or helpful suggestion, good sir.

Here's what you can do:

Credits & License

  • Copyright (c) 2011 John Bintz
  • Original Qt WebKit runner Copyright (c) 2010 Sencha Inc.
  • Jasmine JavaScript library Copyright (c) 2008-2011 Pivotal Labs

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.