Painless JavaScript testing with Jest
The most important way to learn how to test React components in the right way is by writing some code, and that is what we are going to do in this section.
The React documentation says that at Facebook they use Jest to test their components. However, React does not force you to use a particular test framework and you can use your favorite one without any problems.
In the next section, you will learn how it's possible to test components using Mocha.
To see Jest in action we are going to create a project from scratch, installing all the dependencies and writing a component with some tests. It'll be fun!
The first thing to do is to move into a new folder and run:
npm init
Once the package.json
is created we can start installing the dependencies, with the first one being the jest
package itself:
npm install --save-dev jest
To tell npm
that we want to use the jest
command to run the tests, we have to add the following scripts to the package.json
:
"scripts": ...