Unit Testing Commander Scripts With Jest

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Scenario

We are creating a Commander based CLI and we wish to unit test the result of running it with Jest.

Approach

First we will scaffold an example project.

mkdir cli
cd cli
npm init -y
npm i -S commander
npm i -D jest
touch index.js //The commander script
touch index.spec.js //The JEST Unit test

Commander Script

In index.js implement the script:

#!/usr/bin/env node
var program = require('commander');
program
  .version('1.0.0')
  .option('-p, --parameters [type]', 'Add parameter')
  .parse(process.argv);
if (program.parameter) console.log('  - %s parameter', program.parameter);

Jest Unit Test

The cli function runs the command line defined in index.js returns a Promise that contains the result of running the Commander command line script:

let path = require('path');
let exec = require('child_process').exec;
test('Code should be 0', async () => {
  let result = await  cli(['-p', 'parameter'], '.');
  expect(result.code).toBe(0);
})
function cli(args, cwd) {
  return new Promise(resolve => { 
    exec(`node ${path.resolve('./index')} ${args.join(' ')}`,
    { cwd }, 
    (error, stdout, stderr) => { resolve({
    code: error && error.code ? error.code : 0,
    error,
    stdout,
    stderr })
  })
})}

Make sure that scripts is configured properly in package.json :

"scripts": {
  "test": "jest"
}

Run npm test . This will run the unit test in index.spec.js .

Change Runtime Directory

We pass . as the current runtime directory in the statement:

let result = await  cli(['-p', 'parameter'], '.');

The . is the cwd or current working directory parameter. If you change this to something else like ./sandbox/ then the script will consider ./sandbox to be the current runtime directory.

Real World Example

Check out index.spec.js for the SuperflyCSS CLI:

@superflycss/cli