Restoring Junit XML Report to Jasmine

While building our new widget, we ran a massive number of tests over it. Seriously: we’ve created hundreds of automated and manual tests for it, even covering all items described in our documentation.

The reason is because our widget is our most appealing selling product: it’s a 5 minute integration, it has an awesome UX, and it works beautifully on mobile.

Automated tests are only good if you run them, that’s why we use a CI tool to run our specs after every code commit. For CI tool, we like Shippable. Why? It’s a service (with several reasonable plans, including a free one), works smoothly out of the box (you don’t need to set up a Jenkins server, yay!), it has integrations with GitHub, Slack (and several others), it’s customizable and has nice documentation, it can returns number of passed tests, coverage, etc.

The plan

We found jasmine to be a close JavaScript alternative to Ruby specs. And it’s popular and well maintained.

So the idea: every time someone pushes code to your GitHub repository, a CI tool will run our test suite, returning green or red according the test results.

The problem

After get our specs running with jasmine in Shippable, we were just missing the proper report (with number of passed tests) and coverage.

Coverage we’ve fixed with istanbul node module.

But for reporting, we found an issue: current version of jasmine lost the ability to provide reports in JUnit XML format, when compared with old jasmine-node .

Adding back additional reporters

There is a node module called jasmine-reporters that adds some additional report formats to jasmine. But the integration is not smooth: you have to write additional code in your test suite to add the reporters.

Jasmine XML Reporter

In order to make our specs produce the JUnit XML reporter back in a smooth way (no code changes required), we’ve created a node module: jasmine-xml-reporter.

It restores 2 lost abilities to jasmine:

• ability to provide results in JUnit XML format (using the --junitreport param);
• an option to specify an output dir while running from the command line (--output param).

Install

Simple as any node module:

npm install jasmine-xml-reporter

Usage

To run tests with command line output only (default behavior, same as use jasmine directly):

./node_modules/jasmine-xml-reporter/bin/jasmine.js

To run tests and generate a JUnit XML report:

./node_modules/jasmine-xml-reporter/bin/jasmine.js --junitreport

To run tests, generate a JUnit XML report and place the output in a specific folder:

./node_modules/jasmine-xml-reporter/bin/jasmine.js --junitreport --output=shippable/testresults/

If npm test is already an alias to ./node_modules/jasmine-xml-reporter/bin/jasmine.js, then run with:

npm test -- --junitreport --output=shippable/testresults/

All done

And now we can see the number of passing and failing (for shame!) specs right in Shippable/Slack/email etc.

We hope that other developers find this module useful. With all the open source software we use, it feels good to give a little back.