test-until

A utility that returns a promise that resolves when the passed function returns true. It works like Jasmine's waitsFor, but Promise based.

Installation

Node.js:

npm install --save[-dev] test-until

Requirements

test-until requires a global variable Promise which needs to be a A+ compliant promise implementation (such as is available by default in most modern browsers). If you need to polyfill Promise for any reason (such as supporting IE 11), I recommend promise-polyfill.

Usage

var promise = until(checkFunc, message, timeout)

• checkFunc - A function that returns a truthy value once the promise should be resolved. until will call this function repeatedly until it returns true or the timeout elapses.
• message (optional) - A message to help identify failing cases. For example, setting this to "value == 42" will reject with an error of "timed out waiting until value == 42" if it times out. Defaults to "something happens".
• timeout (optional) - The number of milliseconds to wait before timing out and rejecting the promise. Defaults to 1000.

The three arguments can be supplied in any order depending on your preferences. For example, putting the message first can make the line read a little more like English:

until('we know the answer to life, the universe, and everything', function () { return val === 42 }, 500)

Example with Test Framework

Here's an example using the Mocha testing framework.

var until = require('test-until')
 
describe('something', function () {
  it('tests things', function (done) {
    var val = 0
    setTimeout(function () { val = 42 }, 100)
    var promise = until(function () { val === 42 })
    promise.then(function() {
      // after 100ms, `val` will be set to `42`
      // and the promise returned from `until` will resolve
      done()
    })
  })
})

test-until reads and works even better with access to async/await in your tests, allowing you to wait for multiple async conditions with no callbacks in a manner that reads much like English:

import until from 'test-until'
 
describe('something', function () {
  it('tests things', async function () {
    let val = 0
    let otherVal = 0
    setTimeout(() => val = 42, 100)
    setTimeout(() => otherVal = 2048, 200)
    // Awaiting a rejected promise will cause a synchronous `throw`,
    // which will reject the promise returned from the async function
    // and will fail the test.
    await until('val is 42', () => val === 42)
    await until('otherVal is 2048', () => otherVal === 2048)
  })
})

Advanced Usage

Setting the Default Timeout

Use until.setDefaultTimeout(ms) to set the default timeout. You can easily set this to different values in different parts of your test suite by setting it in a beforeEach

import until from 'test-until'
 
// Set a global default timeout
beforeEach(function () {
  until.setDefaultTimeout(500)
})
 
describe('slow stuff', function () {
  beforeEach(function () {
    // Make it a bit longer for these tests
    until.setDefaultTimeout(1000)
  })
  // ...
})

Passing a falsy ms resets to the default of 1000.

Setting the Error Message from Inside the Check Function

The check function gets called with a special argument called setError which allows the check function to specify an error to return if the until call times out. This can be useful when integrating until with other test assertions; for example, here's a snippet that will wait for val to be 42 and will reject with an actual Chai assertion error if it fails.

import until from 'test-until'
import {assert} from 'chai'
 
describe('something', function () {
  it('tests things', async function () {
    let val = 0
    setTimeout(() => val = 42, 100)
    await until(setError => {
      try {
        assert.equal(val, 42)
        return true
      } catch (err) {
        return setError(err) // explicitly set the error
      }
    })
  })
})

Development

The test suite uses newer JavaScript features, so you need Node.js 6+ in order to run it. Run npm test to run the suite.