set_up.md

Set up

• Create project:

meteor create my_project
cd $_

• Delete the default files created:

rm my_project*

• Create a public folder

mkdir public

• Create our app package

meteor create --package kuzcoo:app

• Adding our app package to our project

Yes, we need to add our own package to our meteor project in order to use it. To do so, we have to set an environnement variables, PACKAGE_DIRS, to the path of our "packages" directory. Here we'll use the "packages" directory of our project for the example.

export PACKAGE_DIRS="$(pwd)/packages"

Now add the package

meteor add kuzcoo:app

By now, we should have our app "package" in an "packages" folder at the root of our project.

• Create the arborescence

mkdir packages/app/{client,server,collections,routes,tests}

Following that guide, I chose a pretty classical structure within my package.

• Moving the test file to our tests directory and add two more

mv app-tests.js tests/app-client-tests.js
touch tests/app-{server,both}-tests.js

First file to test the client side, the second to test server side and the third, for testing both.

• Adding Meteor's core dependencies

// ./package.js

Package.describe({
  name: 'app',
  version: '0.0.1',
  // Brief, one-line summary of the package.
  summary: '',
  // URL to the Git repository containing the source code for this package.
  git: '',
  // By default, Meteor will default to using README.md for documentation.
  // To avoid submitting documentation, set this field to null.
  documentation: 'README.md'
});

Package.onUse(function(api) {
  api.versionsFrom('1.2.1');
  api.use('ecmascript');
  // Adding core dependendies
  api.use(['templating', 'underscore']);
  api.use(['mongo'], ['client', 'server']);
  // Adding a router
  api.use('iron:router', 'client');
});

Inside "package.js" we declare package dependencies and the file we want our package to be aware of. ecmascript package permits to transpile our code from ES6 to ES5.

• Remove unsafe packages

meteor remove insecure autopublish

• Testing support

We'll use Tinytest for unit testing.

We modify the path of our test file.

// ./package.js

Package.onTest(function(api) {
  api.use('ecmascript');
  api.use('tinytest');
  api.use('app');
  // to test templates
  api.use(['templating', 'underscore'], 'client'); 
  // to test routes
  api.use('iron:router', 'client');
  // here
  api.addFiles('tests/app-client-tests.js', 'client');
  api.addFiles('tests/app-server-tests.js', 'server');
  api.addFiles('tests/app-both-tests.js', ['client', 'server']);
});

Here, for unit testing meteor will use tinytest and our app package itself.

For end-to-end testing we'll use starrynight with Nightwatch, that I found pretty easy to use and configure, and especially because there is valuable documentation and examples, thanks to Abigail Watson, who put a lots of efforts into meteor-cookbook. Furthermore, Nightwatch offers a quite clear code structure with hidden built-in or custom methods. More on that later.

If you don't have starrynight (yes Meteor community is all about night life) yet, I would suggest you to install it globally.

npm -g install starrynight

Note that on OS X, we seem to have to use sudo for permissions issues.

Now, let's scaffold a nice testing environnement.

# generate the nigthwatch config file
starrynight generate-autoconfig
# before scaffolding we change dir
cd packages/app
# scaffolding a testing environnement
starrynight scaffold --framework nightwatch

By default the path to our "tests" directory is relative to the current dir, and it seems that run-tests only works from the root of the project where it cans locate the "nightwatch.json" file. So we edit our 'nightwatch.json' file and with a search and replace we change each path beginning with "./tests/" to "./packages/app/tests/".

ps: if you use Sublime Text you can just select './tests' and select all occurences pressing ctrl+cmd+G (os x).

• Create an alias for running tests

For convenience we'll just set an alias to run nightwatch tests, because it is quite long.

alias run-tests='starrynight run-tests --framework nightwatch --env phantomjs'

You'll just have to type run-tests to to start your end to end tests now.