Learn

Automate and Organize Tests

Hooks

Using teardown in the it block made your test isolated, but not reliable.

If the system encounters an error before it reaches the teardown, it will not execute that phase. In the previous example, an error may occur after the file is created but before it is deleted. The file would persist and may cause false negatives in future test runs.

Mocha provides hooks to solve that problem.

A hook is a piece of code that is executed when a certain event happens. Hooks can be used to set and reset conditions like the setup and teardown phases do. In Mocha, a hook is written within a describe block.

describe('example', () => {

  afterEach(() => {
    // teardown goes here
  });

  it('.sample', () => {
    // test goes here
  });
});

In this example the function passed to afterEach is called after each it block is executed.

The other hooks in the Mocha library are before(), beforeEach(), and after(). You can read more about them on the Mocha website.

Instructions

Run the test suite.

A misspelling on line 16 caused the TypeError that you see. It prevented the execution of the teardown phase! This means the message.txt file wasn’t deleted (see below).

project
|_ node_modules
|_ test
|___ index_test.js
|_ message.txt
|_ package.json

In the terminal enter rm message.txt to delete the file.

Within the describe block, create an afterEach hook with an empty function as its argument.

Move the teardown phase into the afterEach hook.

Confirm the hook works!

Run test suite and find that message.txt is deleted despite the error in it block.

Sign up to start coding

Or sign up using:

Already have an account?