Node request module not getting response during testing

Question

I am new to node and using the node.js module request to fire an http request to google.

I then use the testing library chai to test whether the http request was successful. The test is failing and I cannot for the life of me understand why.

The code is below:

//validator.js
var request = require('request')

export function validateWeb(website) {
   request('http://www.google.com', function (error, response, body) {
       if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) {
           console.log("Inside the successful callback!") //not being printed
           return response.statusCode
       }
   })
}

The test is below:

//validator_spec.js
import {validateWeb} from '../src/validator'

describe ('Validator', () => {
    describe ('correctly validates', () => {
         it('existing site', () => {
             const site = "http://www.google.com"
             var result = validateWeb(site)
             expect(result).to.equal(200)
         })
    })
})

What am I missing? The test itself is up and running when I run npm test (but the assertion is failing).

Answer 1

Your validator is asynchronous so you need to provide and use a callback (or a Promise):

//validator.js
var request = require('request')

export function validateWeb(website, callback) {
   request(website, (error, response, body) => {
       if (error) return callback(error)
       callback(null, response.statusCode)
   })
}

Then in your test:

//validator_spec.js
import {validateWeb} from '../src/validator'

describe ('Validator', () => {
    describe ('correctly validates', () => {
         it('existing site', (done) => {
             const site = "http://www.google.com"
             validateWeb(site, (err, result) => {
                 if (err) return done(err)
                 expect(result).to.equal(200)
             })
         })
    })
})