Using Chai with TypeScript and Mocha

Continuing my work on Decorator-drive dependency injection in Typescript I've overhauled the tests by replacing the manual assertions with chai. Chai provides a fluent api for writing descriptive assertions - there are a couple of different flavours, personally I feel the expect style pairs well with TypeScript as I'm not a fan of extending Object.prototype.

Installation is straight forward. First install chai as a dev dependency:

npm install chai --save-dev

Next grab the d.ts file for chai via tsd to obtain the type definitions.

tsd install chai --save

You can now start refactoring your test cases; given the following simple mocha test-case:

describe('Calculator', () => {
  it('should add two numbers', () => {
    const calc : Calculator = new Calculator();

    // Manual assertion.
    if (calc.add(5, 3) !== 8) {
      throw new Error('expected 5 + 3 to equal 8');
    }
  });
});

We can leverage chai's expect method to perform the assertion:

import { expect } from 'chai';

describe('Calculator', () => {
  it('should add two numbers', () => {
    const calc : Calculator = new Calculator();

    // Chai assertion.
    expect(calc.add(5, 3)).to.equal(8);
  });
});

When running the tests, chai will provide a useful error message should the assertion fail:

1 failing

  1) Calculator should add two numbers:

      AssertionError: expected 6 to equal 8
      + expected - actual

      -8
      +6

      at Context.<anonymous> (test/Calculator.spec.js:26:45)

Check out this pull request which highlights how I integrated chai into the ts-prop-inject project.