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Testing

When writing tests for your Connect for Node.js application, your approach will vary depending on whether you are testing clients or backend services. There are similarities in the setups as well as advantages and disadvantages for each. Below we'll list a few techniques for testing both.

Clients​

The process of testing your Connect for Node.js clients involves verifying that your client is sending the expected requests and reacting correctly to various responses. Consequently, when writing tests for your clients, you will have to define a server to interact with during your tests.

Testing against a running server​

With this approach, you can run a full HTTP server over TCP, and use your clients under test to call procedures, asserting that the result matches expectations. The big benefit is that you get a behavior that is closest to a real deployment. It lets you get closest to a production deployment and will factor in test other processes that your server might interact with, including middleware. The big drawback is that it requires a lot of legwork to get a working server setup for your tests.

Testing against an in-memory server​

With an in-memory server, you can test your Connect clients against a route in isolation and circumvent any other routes or middleware that your server might implement. To accomplish this, you can use the createRouterTransport function exported from @connectrpc/connect. This in-memory transport is a special transport that does not make HTTP requests over the network, but directly calls the supplied Connect routes instead. The Transport returned from createRouterTransport can be used to create clients and call procedures, asserting that the result matches expectations.

One of the benefits with testing clients against an in-memory server is the ease of setup. For example, request and response messages are serialized. Headers, trailers, errors and other Connect features are supported, too. However, the behavior under test is not as close to a real deployment. Since requests are not going through the network, there are many areas not factored into the test that could result in a false sense of security about the completeness of your client coverage.

Mocking services​

It may not always be feasible or desirable to test against an actual API. For example, you may want to write a test route that hardcodes certain scenarios such as always returning an error or always returning an empty response. In such cases, you can utilize a mocked Connect backend to test your application again using Connect's createRouterTransport function.

As mentioned, the function createRouterTransport from @connectrpc/connect creates an in-memory server with the supplied routes. So, you can provide your own RPC implementations just for testing purposes.

To illustrate, let's setup a very simple ELIZA service:

import { ElizaService } from "@buf/connectrpc_eliza.connectrpc_es/connectrpc/eliza/v1/eliza_connect";
import { SayResponse } from "@buf/connectrpc_eliza.connectrpc_es/connectrpc/eliza/v1/eliza_pb";
import { createRouterTransport } from "@connectrpc/connect";

const mockTransport = createRouterTransport(({ service }) => {
  service(ElizaService, {
    say: () => new SayResponse({ sentence: "I feel happy." }),
  });
});

Under the hood, this mock transport runs nearly the same code that a server running on Node.js would run. This means that all features from implementing real services are available: You can access request headers, raise errors with details, and also mock streaming responses. Here is an example that raises an error on the fourth request:

const mockTransport = createRouterTransport(({ service }) => {
  const sentences: string[] = [];
  service(ElizaService, {
    say(request: SayRequest) {
      sentences.push(request.sentence);
      if (sentences.length > 3) {
        throw new ConnectError(
          "I have no words anymore.",
          Code.ResourceExhausted,
        );
      }
      return new SayResponse({
        sentence: `You said ${sentences.length} sentences.`,
      });
    },
  });
});

With this mock, you can test how your client will react to returned errors after subsequent responses. You can also use expectations to assert that your client sends requests as expected:

const mockTransport = createRouterTransport(({ service }) => {
  service(ElizaService, {
    say(request) {
      expect(request.sentence).toBe("how do you feel?");
      return new SayResponse({ sentence: "I feel happy." });
    },
  });
});

The createRouterTransport function also accepts an optional second argument, allowing you to pass options like interceptors.

Examples​

For a working example of all three approaches in vanilla Node.js, check out the client.test.ts file in the vanilla-node project of our examples-es repo.

Services​

As with clients, there are multiple ways for testing your Connect-Node services each with their own benefits. The approaches mainly follow the same concepts as with clients with the only difference being what you are testing.

Testing with a running server​

This approach is basically the same concept as described above regarding using a running server. With this approach, you can set up test clients to send various configurations of requests and verify your routes are behaving as planned. This approach works well with plain Node.js, Fastify, and Express.

note

We do not recommend using fastify.inject() for testing Connect routes. fastify.inject() is a great tool, but using it means you have to handle details of the protocol like Content-Type headers and status codes yourself. This is rather straight-forward for Connect unary, but much less so for streaming RPCs, or the gRPC or gRPC-Web protocols.

Testing with an in-memory server​

Likewise, this follows the same concept as its client counterpart above. The idea is to test your routes in isolation without factoring in any ancillary servers or middleware. The setup is the same as above and can be facilitated through the use of createRouterTransport.

This approach works well with Next.js, where spinning up a full server in tests is not trivial.

Unit testing a service​

Unit testing a service side-steps TCP and HTTP altogether and calls the service methods directly, without the need for clients, transports, and other processes used when interacting with an actual server. This approach is ideal for unit testing, but it requires implementing services as classes using helper types. This way, you can simply instantiate your service class directory and invoke methods on the service directly.

Examples​

Our examples-es repo provides examples for all three approaches in Fastify, Express, and vanilla Node.js.

In addition, check out the Next.js project for an example of testing with an in-memory server and unit testing service methods directly in Next.js