Karma

Intro

Karma is used to run AngularJS specs.

Getting set up

On OS X Mavericks

Annoyingly, we need to install the Node.js Package Manage (npm) to install karma. Amusingly, one can install npm with homebrew, and vice-versa. I chose to install npm with homebrew:

$ brew update
$ brew install npm

Once that is complete, you should be able to jump straight to installing karma. NOTE: At present I would recommend using the global flag (-g) for installing karma packages with npm, as we have not yet set up a npm package.json file to manage versioning and dependencies within the ofn project.

$ brew update
$ npm install -g karma

Next we need a bunch of other packages (as they are now split up into separately rather than being contained in one all-inclusive package): the jasmine BDD testing framework, the coffee preprocessor and a chrome-launcher:

$ npm install karma-jasmine
$ npm install karma-coffee-preprocessor
$ npm install karma-chrome-launcher

You will likely need to install the karma command line packages as well:

$ sudo npm install -g karma-cli

Check that NodeJS is installed. If you install from a package manager you bin may be called nodejs so you just need to symlink it:

$ ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node

If you are using ubuntu, make sure you have Chromium installed. You might have to updated the env var $CHROME_BIN to point to Chromium:

$ export CHROME_BIN="/usr/bin/chromium-browser"

And then you should be ready to go (see next section)....

Usage of Karma

Running AngularJS specs with karma has been made pretty simple through use of a rake task which pulls together the karma configuration file (config/ng-test.conf.js), and a manifest file (spec/javascripts/application_spec.js) and then passes them on to karma to run:

$ rake karma:start

or if you are using zeus:

$ zeus rake karma:start