jasmine

What is jasmine?

Jasmine is a behavior-driven development framework for testing JavaScript code. It does not rely on any other JavaScript frameworks and does not require a DOM. Jasmine is designed to be easy to configure and provides features to write different types of tests for JavaScript applications.

What are jasmine's main functionalities?

Writing Specs

This feature allows you to write test cases (specs) within a suite. A suite begins with a call to the global Jasmine function 'describe' with two parameters: the title of the suite and a function containing one or more specs.

describe('A suite', function() {\n  it('contains spec with an expectation', function() {\n    expect(true).toBe(true);\n  });\n});

Setup and Teardown

This feature allows you to define code that will run before and after each spec in a suite. 'beforeEach' and 'afterEach' are used to set up preconditions and clean up after your specs.

describe('A suite', function() {\n  beforeEach(function() {\n    // Code to execute before each spec in this suite\n  });\n  afterEach(function() {\n    // Code to execute after each spec in this suite\n  });\n});

Asynchronous Support

This feature supports asynchronous tests, which are crucial for handling AJAX, timeouts, or any operations that rely on external systems. The 'done' callback is used to tell Jasmine when the asynchronous function has completed.

describe('Async spec', function() {\n  it('supports async execution of test preparation and expectations', function(done) {\n    setTimeout(function() {\n      expect(true).toBe(true);\n      done();\n    }, 1000);\n  });\n});

Other packages similar to jasmine

mocha

Mocha is a feature-rich JavaScript test framework running on Node.js and in the browser, making asynchronous testing simple. Mocha is often compared to Jasmine, as both provide similar test structuring capabilities, but Mocha requires assertion libraries like Chai to be fully functional, whereas Jasmine has assertions built in.

jest

Jest is a JavaScript testing framework designed to ensure correctness of any JavaScript codebase. It allows you to write tests with an approachable, familiar and feature-rich API that gives you results quickly. Jest is used by Facebook to test all JavaScript code including React applications. It includes built-in test runners and assertion functions, similar to Jasmine, but also provides snapshot testing, a unique feature not available in Jasmine.

README

The Jasmine Package

The jasmine package is a command line interface and supporting code for running Jasmine specs under Node.

The core of jasmine lives at https://github.com/jasmine/jasmine and is jasmine-core in npm.

Contents

This package allows you to run Jasmine specs for your Node.js code. The output will be displayed in your terminal by default.

Documentation

https://jasmine.github.io/setup/nodejs.html

Quick Start

Installation:

npm install --save-dev jasmine

To initialize a project for Jasmine:

npx jasmine init

To seed your project with some examples:

npx jasmine examples

To run your test suite:

npx jasmine

ES and CommonJS module compatibility

Jasmine is compatible with both ES modules and CommonJS modules. See the setup guide for more information.

Node version compatibility

Jasmine supports Node 18*, 20, 22, and 24.

* Environments that are past end of life are supported on a best-effort basis. They may be dropped in a future minor release of Jasmine if continued support becomes impractical.

Support

Documentation: jasmine.github.io
Please file issues here at GitHub.

Copyright (c) 2014-2019 Pivotal Labs
Copyright (c) 2014-2025 The Jasmine developers
This software is licensed under the MIT License.