quibble

quibble

Quibble is a terser (and more magical) alternative to packages like proxyquire, sandboxed-module and mockery for mocking out dependencies in tests of Node.js modules. Using quibble you can replace how require() will behave for a given path. Its intended use is squarely focused on unit testing. It is almost-but-not-quite a private dependency of testdouble.js, as it implements the td.replace() function's module-replacement behavior.

Usage

Say we're testing pants:

quibble = require('quibble')

describe('pants', function(){
  var subject, legs;
  beforeEach(function(){
    legs = quibble('./../lib/legs', function(){ return 'a leg';});

    subject = require('./../lib/pants');
  });
  it('contains legs', function() {
    expect(subject().left).toContain('a leg')
    expect(subject().right).toContain('a leg')
  })
});

That way, when the subject loaded from lib/pants runs require('./legs'), it will get back the function that returns 'a leg'. The fake value is also returned by quibble, which makes it easy to set and assign a test double in a one-liner.

For more info on how this module is really intended to be used, check out its inclusion in testdouble.js

Configuration

There's only one option: what you want to do with quibbled modules by default.

Say you're pulling in testdouble.js and you want every quibbled module to default to a single test double function with a name that matches its absolute path. You could do this:

quibble = require('quibble')
beforeEach(function(){
  quibble.config({
    defaultFakeCreator: function(path) {
      return require('testdouble').create(path);
    }
  });
});

With this set up, running quibble('./some/path') will default to replacing all require('../anything/that/matches/some/path') invocations with a test double named after the absolute path resolved to by './some/path'.

Spiffy!

How's it different?

A few things that stand out about quibble:

1. No partial mocking, as proxyquire does. Partial Mocks are often seen problematic and not helpful for unit testing designed to create clear boundaries between the SUT and its dependencies
2. Global replacements, so it's easy to set up a few arrange steps in advance of instantiating your subject (using require just as you normally would). The instantiation style of other libs is a little different (e.g. require('./my/subject', {'/this/thing': stub})
3. Require strings are resolved to absolute paths. It can be a bit confusing using other tools because from the perspective of the test particular paths are knocked out from the perspective of the subject and not from the test listing, which runs counter to how every other Node.js API works. Instead, here, the path of the file being knocked out is relative to whoever is knocking it out.
4. A configurable default faker function. This lib was written to support the testdouble.js feature td.replace(), in an effort to reduce the amount of per-test friction to repetitively create & pass in test doubles
5. A reset() method that undoes everything, intended to be run afterEach test runs