Running node commands as part of a grunt driven QUnit test

Question

Running node commands as part of a grunt driven QUnit test

I'm using grunt to package my jQuery plugin. As part of the QUnit tests, I need to run a node command before the tests start to get a consistent result (something like process.env.TZ = 'Europe/London' as my plugin deals with timezones, so results will be different in different timezones).

So my question is: How can you run a node specific command as part of the qunit tests?

Thanks.

node.js
qunit
gruntjs

Answer 1

Create your own grunt task and call the qunit task from inside it:

var exec = require('child_process').exec;

grunt.registerTask('qunit-plus', 'Custom qunit task', function() {
    exec('/usr/bin/mycmd', function(err, stdout, stderr) {
        grunt.task.run('qunit');
    });
});

Then call it with:

$ grunt qunit-plus

NOTE: untested.

Answer 2

Well, after a bit more research, I came across grunt-env @ https://github.com/onehealth/grunt-env

That allows different environment tasks to be defined in the gruntfile, e.g.

env: {
    setTZ : {
        TZ : 'Europe/London'
    }
}

which will define the task env:setTZ to set the timezone. And yes, whilst setting the timezone can be problematic, advice appears to be that so long as you only do it the once, you're OK: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/nodejs/rt8EFR6gdi8/i2Fdp2vDPFQJ

you can set TZ just once, further changes won't get picked up.

Luckily, that's plenty sufficient for my use case, and it works just fine for me.