Writing tests

One of the most common tasks in developing software is writing tests for existing code. Deno has a built-in test runner which makes this very easy.

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First, we import assert statements from the standard library. There are quite a few options but we will just import the most common ones here.

import { assert, assertEquals } from "jsr:@std/assert";

The most simple way to use the test runner is to just pass it a description and a callback function

Deno.test("assert works correctly", () => {
  assert(true);
  assertEquals(1, 1);
});

In more complex scenarios, we often need to have some setup and teardown code with some steps in between. This is also made simple with the built-in test runner.

Deno.test("testing steps", async (t) => {
  const file = await Deno.open("example.txt", {
    read: true,
    write: true,
    create: true,
  });
  const encoder = new TextEncoder();
  const data = encoder.encode("Hello world!");

  await t.step("write some bytes", async () => {
    const bytesWritten = await file.write(data);
    assertEquals(bytesWritten, data.length);
    await file.seek(0, Deno.SeekMode.Start);
  });

  await t.step("read some bytes", async () => {
    const buffer = new Uint8Array(data.length);
    await file.read(buffer);
    assertEquals(buffer, data);
  });

  file.close();
});

The test runner by default makes it very hard to shoot yourself in the foot. For each test, the test runner checks to make sure all resources created during the test are freed. There are situations where this is not useful behavior. We can use the more complex test definition to disable this behavior

Deno.test({
  name: "leaky test",
  async fn() {
    await Deno.open("example.txt");
  },
  sanitizeResources: false,
});

Run this example locally using the Deno CLI:

deno test --allow-read --allow-write https://github.com/denoland/deno-docs/blob/main/examples/writing-tests.ts

Writing tests

Additional resources