Ensuring Express App is running before each Mocha Test

Question

I am working on developing a REST API using ExpressJS, NodeJS, Mongoose and Mocha.

The thing is that I have an app.coffee file, thats responsible for setting up Expr

Answer 1

There might be a more straightforward way, but I went to Grunt for automating my functional tests. There's an express and mocha plugin to reach your goal. My gruntfile:

'use strict';

module.exports = function (grunt) {
grunt.initConfig({
    express: {
        options: {}
      , test: {
            options: {
                script: './app.js'
            }
        }
    }
  , simplemocha: {
        options: {
            globals: ['should']
          , timeout: 8000
          , ignoreLeaks: false
          , ui: 'bdd'
          , reporter: 'tap'
        }
      , all: { src: ['tests/*.test.js'] }
    }
})

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-express-server')
grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-simple-mocha')

grunt.registerTask('default', ['express:test', 'simplemocha', 'express:test:stop'])
}

bonus: add 'grunt' as a git pre-commit hook. This way you cannot commit without passing all the tests