Installing node.js and jasmine-node

Dec 17, 2011

There seem to be a plethora of ways to install node.js, and none of them worked initially for me. Even when I got node itself working, npm (node's creatively named package manager) would refuse to install. Or if I got it installed, it would then refuse to install jasmine-node. So here's what I did to finally get it all working:

Install node.js

At the time I wrote this post, the development version of node was failing to build. So, rather than installing the latest version from git, I had to install from the last stable version:

wget http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.6.5/node-v0.6.5.tar.gztar \
    -xvf node-v0.6.5.tar.gz./configure \
    --prefix=~/localmake install

This will install node into ~/local, and conveniently also installs npm. Finally, add this line to your .bashrc so bash can find node:

export PATH=$HOME/local/bin:$PATH

Install jasmine-node

By default, npm will simply install packages to your pwd. I prefer this option over doing a system wide install, since I can have a per-project environment (somewhat like python's virtualenv). You can install jasmine-node into the project directory like so:

makdir test_project && cd test_projectnpm install jasmine-node

Write a simple test

You're now ready to start writing test specs. Jasmine expects your tests to reside in test_project/spec/ and be named whatever.spec.js. So save the following as test_project/spec/test_hello.spec.js

var hello = require('../hello');

describe('hello_world', function() {
  it('should return hello world', function() {
    var returned_string = hello.hello_world();
    expect(returned_string).toEqual("Hello, world!");
  });

});

You'll need something to test, too, so save the following in test_project parent directory:

function hello_world() {return "Hello, world!";}
exports.hello_world = hello_world;

Finally, you can run jasmine-node and see the test pass. From inside test_project, run the following command:

./node_modules/jasmine-node/bin/jasmine-node spec/

you should see the following output:

Started
.

Finished in 0.002 seconds
1 test, 1 assertion, 0 failures

Bam! Up and running with node.js and jasmine-node.

#JavaScript