Mocha test fails with error from “before all” hook

Question

From what I understand, the mocha test framework will throw this error if some error occurs in the before method:

> $(npm bin)/mocha test/*.j         


        

Answer 1

It has been a little time since it was asked but for the future readers here we go:

You can run your test with mocha test/*.js --timeout 5000 command. That's it.

But if you run your test with npm test command, just edit your package.json file like that:

"scripts": {
    "start": "nodemon ./bin/www",
    "test": "mocha --exit --recursive --timeout 5000" // add this line
  }

Answer 2

As I was posting this question, I stumbled on this bug which led me to the discovery that I need to make a call to this.enableTimeouts(false) in the beginning of the before function, like so:

let server
before(function(done) {
  this.enableTimeouts(false)  <----
  server = require('../app')
  server.initialize()
    .then(() => {
      console.info('listening on', process.env.PORT)
      server.listen(process.env.PORT, done)
    })
    .catch(err => {
      console.log(err)
      done(err)
    })
})

Hopefully this helps someone else a few hours of debugging.