Testacular Quickstart for Linux

published: Jan 18, 2013 12:0 PM

Testacular is a great test runner for JavaScript that’s powered by Node.js. It has great support for Jasmine and AngularJS, makes it easy to debug tests and will automatically re-run tests as you change your application or test code.

To get Testacular, first you need to install Node.js. Node has installers for Windows and Mac and is available in some Linux package managers. Node is not yet available for installation via yum on Fedora, RedHat and CentOS but the install is still straightforward using the precompiled binaries.

Download the “Linux binaries” from the Node download page.
Use tar -xvf to expand the archive and move to your location of choice
Add $NODE_HOME/bin to your path
Execute npm -g install testacular
Run testacular to confirm installation

You can now navigate to the application’s source code directory and perform testacular init and follow the prompts. Then simply use testacular start to launch the browser and use testacular run to run the tests, whether or not you have it to set up to autowatch files.