Gerbil, TDD for the rest of us

Gerbil is my attempt to use a really simple (for real) tdd framework in js, both browser and node.js. The main idea is to provide a simple way to test certain behaviours like assert, assertEqual, assertThrow, etc. Currently the API in really simple and will eventually include some cool features.

Most of the time the tests that we need to execute are not THAT complex, one of my side project is Lodis an implementation in javascript of the well known Redis Server.

For it i'm using LocalStorage as foundation to implement the Redis commands, for that i needed a way to test things in the browser. But all of it seemed so complex for a simple console.log.

So i started that, a REALLY SIMPLE testing suite to do that, assert to console.log. Eventually i've needed some other things so it grow enough to release it.

Install

You can see the project in Github

Using npm

$ npm install gerbil

Or in a browser

https://raw.github.com/elcuervo/gerbil/master/build/gerbil.pack.js

A simple example

scenario("This is my scenario", {
  "setup":  function() {
    // When scenario starts
    this.someThing = new Thing;
  },
  "before": function() {
    // Before every test
    this.someThing.magic_magic();
  },
  "after":  function() {
    // After every test
    this.someThing.clean();
  },
  "cleanup": function() {
    // When the scenario ends
    this.someThing = false;
  },

  "MagicClass should have a length": function(g){
    this.someThing.add(1);
    g.assertEqual(this.someThing.length, 1);
  },

  "MagicClass should be valid": function(g) {
    g.assert(this.someThing.valid);
  }
});

Example output

Console

As i said node.js is supported so the output will look like this:

Browser

On the other hand if you ran it within a browser by default the output will be like this:

Custom

But somethimes you just want to show some thing in your tests so there is a way to use a custom logger to show your tests any way you want.

var my_cool_logger = {
  "warn":   function(msg){},
  "log":    function(msg){},
  "info":   function(msg){},
  "error":  function(msg){
    alert(msg);
  },
};

scenario("Fancy scenario", {
  "somewhere over the rainbow": function(g){
    g.assert(false);
  }
}, my_cool_logger);