Automate Functional Testing in node.js

Question

I checked some NPM libraries to test a webpages or web-services. But all of them expect that the server is already running. Since I want to automate functional testing, how can I setup NPM package in such a way that

It can start the server

Test the application

Stop the server

So that I can test it locally, as well as on online CI tools like travis-ci or circleci.

Case 1: Webservice

I wrote a NPM package which starts nodejs HTTP(s) server. It can be started from command line

$stubmatic

. Currently, I use 2 approaches to test it,

manual : I manually start it from command line. Then run the tests.

Automatic: I use
exec
module to run a unix command which can start the application and run
pkill
command to kill the application. But for this automation, my application need to be installed on testing machine.

Case 2: Website

I have create a NPM package:

fast-xml-parser

and created a demo page within the repo so that I can be tested in the browser. To test the demo page, I currently start a local server using

http-server

npm package manually. Test the application.

What can be the better way to write automate functional tests for node js applications?

Note:

I never used task runners like gulp or grunt. So I'm not sure if they can help in this case.

In case 1, my application starts node js native HTTP server. I'm not using any 3rd party application like
express
currently.

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Answer 1

Case 1: Webservice

Problem 1 As nodejs server.close() was not working. I copied paste this snippet in every test file which is starting my webservice.

try{
    server.setup(options);
    server.start();
}catch(err){
    console.log(err);
}

Once all the tests are completed, server stops.

**Problem 2 I was using chai-http incorrectly. Here is the complete working solution.

//Need to be placed before importing chai and chai-http
if (!global.Promise) {
  global.Promise = require('q');
}

var server = require('.././lib/server');
var chai = require('chai')
  , chaiHttp = require('chai-http');

 chai.use(chaiHttp);

try{
    server.setup(someoptions);
    server.start();
}catch(err){
    console.log(err);
}

describe('FT', function () {

  describe('scenario::', function () {

    it('responds to POST', function (done) {
        chai.request("http://localhost:9999")
            .post('/someurl')
            .then(res => {
                expect(res.status).toBe(200);
                //console.log(res.text);
                done();
            }).catch( err => {
                console.log(err);
                done();
            });
    });

});

Case 2: Website This was quite simple.

I used http-server to start the server so my html files can be accessed.
I used zombie js for browser testing. (There are many other options available for browser testing)

Here is the code

process.env.NODE_ENV = 'test';

const Browser = require('zombie');
const httpServer = require('http-server');

describe("DemoApp", function() {
  var browser = new Browser({site: 'http://localhost:8080'});
  var server = httpServer.createServer();
  server.listen(8080);

  beforeEach(function(done){
      browser.visit('/', done);
  });

  describe("Parse XML", function() {

    it("should parse xml to json", function(done) {
       browser.pressButton('#submit');
       browser.assert.text('#result', 'some result text');
       done();
    });
   });

   afterEach(function(){
       server.close();
   })
});

Automate Functional Testing in node.js

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