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One of the downsides of Meteor and perhaps strongest complaint is that it doesn’t play nicely with existing NodeJS modules. You’re forced to use the available SmartPackages (or build one). This is a problem since the Mocha environment runs without the browser and doesn’t have access to the libraries included by the SmartPackage.

Here’s a previous post describing how to setup everything

Creating the project:

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meteor create mocha-router
meteor add backbone
meteor add coffeescript
cd mocha-router
mkdir client
mkdir server
mkdir tests
cd tests
mkdir lib

When I first installed the modules, I installed them in my project root, but this caused Meteor to try to load them in the both the client/server environment which crashed the Meteor server. Luckily, Meteor will ignore anything in the tests folder so we can install the necessary modules there.

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npm install should
npm install backbone
mocha *.coffee --compilers coffee:coffee-script

My goal was to create a very basic Backbone router test. Normally, I’d define the router like so:

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SampleRouter = @Backbone.Router.extend(
  routes:
    "": "index"

  index: ->
)
new SampleRouter

This won’t work when running the Mocha tests because it assumes the Meteor framework is present to load Backbone. I solved this by creating a factory for the router and injecting the Backbone module.

Note, I need to put this module in tests/lib so Meteor will make sure to load it first

lib/sample_router_factory.coffee:

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root = exports ? this

class SampleRouterFactory
  constructor: (@Backbone) ->

  getRouter: () ->
    SampleRouter = @Backbone.Router.extend(
      routes:
        "": "index"

      index: ->
        Session.set "test", "test"
    )
    new SampleRouter

root.SampleRouterFactory = SampleRouterFactory

Exports is a global object accessible in the nodeJS environment that Mocha runs in. See this ebook for more details.

This module will now create a class that will return a new instance of the SampleRouter.

Now, let’s look at the test case:

tests/sample_router_factory_test.coffee

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should = require('should')
Backbone = require('backbone')
SampleRouterFactory = require('../client/lib/sample_router_factory').SampleRouterFactory

describe "SampleRouter", ->
  factory = new SampleRouterFactory(Backbone)
  router = factory.getRouter(Backbone)
  it "should have an index router", ->
    router.routes[''].should.equal('index')

Lastly, in the actual Meteor app I create the app a similar way:

mocha-router.coffee

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Meteor.startup ->
  factory = new SampleRouterFactory(Backbone)
  router = factory.getRouter(Backbone)

Again, there’s no need to require either Backbone (loaded as a SmartPackage) or the actual SampleRouterFactory because Meteor treats all of your CoffeeScript files as a single file and consequently scope.

Source code here.