Discourse has extensive frontend tests for core, plugins and themes. Once you have a functioning local development environment, those tests can be run locally in a number of different ways.
Running tests in the browser
Core / Plugins: Visit /tests in your development environment
Themes: Visit /theme-qunit in your development (or production) environment, then choose the theme
In general, when working on core tests you should enable “Skip Plugins”, and when you’re working on plugins you should choose the specific plugin from the dropdown list (which will automatically ‘Skip Core’). The core test suite is not expected to pass when plugins are enabled (because plugins often deliberately change core’s behavior)
Unfortunately, at the time of writing, memory leaks in our tests mean that trying to running the entire suite in one browser tends to hit the browser memory limit. To run the entire suite across multiple browsers in parallel, check out the CLI examples below.
Running tests on the CLI
Core
From the root directory of Discourse, use bin/qunit (make sure you have run pnpm install since you last pulled in upstream changes). It wraps Ember Exam for randomization and parallelisation, and by default runs against the running Rails server and existing JS assets. Run bin/qunit --help for the full list of options.
Here are some useful examples:
# Run a single test file, or every test in a directory:
bin/qunit frontend/discourse/tests/integration/components/bookmark-test.gjs
bin/qunit frontend/discourse/tests/integration/components
# Run the entire core suite across 5 headless Chrome instances in parallel:
bin/qunit --parallel 5
# Run all tests whose "module: test name" contains a substring (case-insensitive):
bin/qunit --filter "Integration | Component | bookmark"
# Slash-wrap the value to match with a regular expression, e.g. for alternation:
bin/qunit --filter "/bookmark|reaction/i"
# Spin up an isolated server and run in a visible browser for easier debugging:
bin/qunit --standalone --no-headless
--filteris forwarded to QUnit: a plain value matches as a case-insensitive substring, while a slash-wrapped value like/foo/imatches as a regular expression. Include theiflag for case-insensitive regex matching.
Plugins
From the root directory of Discourse:
bin/rake "plugin:qunit" # Run all plugin qunit tests
bin/rake "plugin:qunit[discourse-chat-integration]" # Run a single plugin's qunit tests
Themes
From the root directory of Discourse:
bin/rake "themes:qunit[url,<theme_url>]"
bin/rake "themes:qunit[name,<theme_name>]"
bin/rake "themes:qunit[id,<theme_id>]"
This document is version controlled - suggest changes on github.