How to specify test directory for mocha?

Use this:

mocha server-test

Or if you have subdirectories use this:

mocha "server-test/**/*.js"

Note the use of double quotes. If you omit them you may not be able to run tests in subdirectories.

Here's one way, if you have subfolders in your test folder e.g.

/test
/test/server-test
/test/other-test

Then in linux you can use the find command to list all *.js files recursively and pass it to mocha:

mocha $(find test -name '*.js')

If you want to do it by still just running mocha on the command line, but wanted to run the tests in a folder ./server-tests instead of ./test, create a file at ./test/mocha.opts with just this in the file:

server-tests

If you wanted to run everything in that folder and subdirectories, put this into test/mocha.opts

server-tests
--recursive

mocha.opts are the arguments passed in via the command line, so making the first line just the directory you want to change the tests too will redirect from ./test/

Don't use the -g or --grep option, that pattern operates on the name of the test inside of it(), not the filesystem. The current documentation is misleading and/or outright wrong concerning this. To limit the entire command to a portion of the filesystem, you can pass a pattern as the last argument (its not a flag).

For example, this command will set your reporter to spec but will only test js files immediately inside of the server-test directory:

mocha --reporter spec server-test/*.js

This command will do the same as above, plus it will only run the test cases where the it() string/definition of a test begins with "Fnord:":

mocha --reporter spec --grep "Fnord:" server-test/*.js

This doesn't seem to be any "easy" support for changing test directory.
However, maybe you should take a look at this issue, relative to your question.

I am on Windows 7 using node.js v0.10.0 and mocha v1.8.2 and npm v1.2.14. I was just trying to get mocha to use the path test/unit to find my tests, After spending to long and trying several things I landed,

Using the "test/unit/*.js" option does not work on windows. For good reasons that windows shell doesn't expand wildcards like unixen.

However using "test/unit" does work, without the file pattern. eg. "mocha test/unit" runs all files found in test/unit folder.

This only still runs one folder files as tests but you can pass multiple directory names as parameters.

Also to run a single test file you can specify the full path and filename. eg. "mocha test/unit/mytest1.js"

I actually setup in package.json for npm "scripts": { "test": "mocha test/unit" },

So that 'npm test' runs my unit tests.

I had this problem just now and solved it by removing the --recursive option (which I had set) and using the same structure suggested above:

mochify "test/unit/**/*.js"

This ran all tests in all directories under /test/unit/ for me while ignoring the other directories within /test/