NodeJs Server Request Testing

Question

For testing my NodeJs Server I am using mocha and supertest . But I don`t like the simplicity of my tests, they actually are not checking server properly.

// simple test
describe('Server GET requests', function() {
    it('GET /index', function(done){
        request(app)
            .get('/')
            .expect(200, done)
    })
})

So the test is only checking that server has a response for the request, but is not checking the correctnes of the response. I want test to be looking something like this:

// test should be
describe('Server GET requests', function() {
    it('GET /index', function(done){
        request(app)
            .get('/')
            .expect(200)
            .end(function (err, res) {
                if (err != null)
                    done(err);
                checkContentTitle('Home Page', res.text);
                checkContent(params, res.text);
                done();
            })
    })
})

// function to check the title of the send result
function checkContentTitle(title, htmlText){
    // checkTitle(title, parse('title', htmlText));
}

But I can`t find the propriate way of doing this.

What is a good practice of testing server responses, GET-request responses for example? I suppose I need some tols like html\\DOM parser, to get specific tags? Can somebody advise proper tools?

Answer 1

Try the cheerio library:

cheerio

It works like jquery for selecting DOM elements, very easy to use.

You can compare the cheerio returned values with the assertions that you want.

Example of test/test.js:

var assert = require("assert");
var cheerio = require('cheerio');
var request = require('request');


describe('domtesting', function() {
  describe('GET /', function () {
    it('title must be Hello', function (done) {

        request('http://example.com/',function(err,response,html){

            if(!err){
                var $ = cheerio.load(html);
                assert.equal('Hello', $('title').text());
                done();
            }
            else{
                console.log(err);
            }
        })
    });
  });
});

Use named functions or mocha promise syntax in order to get more readable and maintainable code. I also used the request library for launch http request inside tests.