Starting with unit testing using Vue.js 2 and Jest

As a FrontEnd developer, you may know a lot of FrontEnd technologies and frameworks but in time you need to upgrade yourself as a developer. A good skill to strengthen your knowledge is to learn unit testing.

Since I am working with Vue.js for several years, we are going to see some of the basics for testing Vue components using the Jest JavaScript testing framework.

To start, first, we need a Vue.js 2 project created via the Vue CLI. After that we need to add the Jest framework to the project:

# jest unit testing
vue add @vue/unit-jest

I’ll make a simple component that will increase a number on click of a button:

// testComponent.js
export default {
  template: `
    <div>
      <span class="count">{{ count }}</span>
      <button @click="increase">Increase</button>
    </div>
  `,

  data() {
    return {
      count: 0
    }
  },

  methods: {
    increase () {
      this.count++
    }
  }
}

The way of testing is by mounting the components in isolation, after that comes the mocking the needed inputs like injections, props and user events. In the end, comes the confirmation of the outputs of the rendered results emitted events etc.

After that, the components are returned inside a wrapper. A wrapper is an object that contains a mounted component or a VNode and methods to test them.

Let’s create a wrapper using the mount method:

// jestTest.js

// first we import the mount method
import { mount } from '@/vue/test-utils'
import Calculate from './calculate'

// then we mount (wrap) the component
const wrapper = mount(Calculate)

// this way you can access the Vue instance
const vm = wrapper.vm

// you can inspect the wrapper by logging it into the console
console.log(wrapper)

Next step after we do the wrapping, follows to verify if the rendered HTML output of the component matches the expectations.

import { mount } from '@vue/test-utils'
import Calculate from './calculate'

describe('Calculate', () => {
  // Now mount the component and you have the wrapper
  const wrapper = mount(Calculate)

  it('renders the correct markup', () => {
    expect(wrapper.html()).toContain('<span class="calculate">0</span>')
  })

  // it's also easy to check for the existence of elements
  it('has a button', () => {
    expect(wrapper.contains('button')).toBe(true)
  })
})

Then run the tests with npm test and see them pass.

The code in testComponent.js should increment the number on button click so next step is to simulate the user interaction. For this, we need the wrapper’s method wrapper.find() to get the wrapper for the button and then simulate the click event by calling the method trigger().

it('simulation of button click should increment the calculate by 2', () => {
  expect(wrapper.vm.calculate).toBe(0)
  const button = wrapper.find('button')
  button.trigger('click')
  button.trigger('click')
  expect(wrapper.vm.calculate).toBe(2)
})

For asynchronous updates, we use the Vue.nextTick()(need to receive a function as a parameter) method, which comes from Vue. With this method, we are waiting for the DOM update and after that, we execute the code (the code in the function parameter).

// this will not be caught

it('time out', done => {
  Vue.nextTick(() => {
    expect(true).toBe(false)
    done()
  })
})


// the three following tests will work as expected 
// (1)

it('catch the error using done method', done => {
  Vue.config.errorHandler = done
  Vue.nextTick(() => {
    expect(true).toBe(false)
    done()
  })
})

// (2)
it('catch the error using a promise', () => {
  return Vue.nextTick()
    .then(function() {
      expect(true).toBe(false)
    })
})

it('catch the error using async/await', async () => {
  await Vue.nextTick()
  expect(true).toBe(false)
})

Using nextTick can be tricky for the errors because the errors thrown inside it might not be caught by the test runner. That is happening as a consequence of using promises internally. To fix this we can set the done callback as a Vue’s global error handler (1) or we can use the nextTick method without parameter and return it as a promise (2) like we did earlier.

This article is a guide on how to set up the environment and start writing unit tests using Jest. For more information about testing with Vue and using Jest, you can visit the official site for Vue test utils.