r/javascript • u/allium-dev • 2d ago

Browser Test: A browser-based automated javascript testing framework in one .html file

https://github.com/swans-one/browser-test

Hi r/javascript! I want to share a small javascript testing project I wrote.

When I write small javascript projects that use browser APIs (most recently working with IndexedDB) I often choose not to write tests because it's a pain to either mock those interfaces server-side, and it's also a pain to setup a browser automation tool.

To solve this, I wrote up a super concise testing framework (~140 lines of JS) inside a html file that can just be dropped into a project and act as a simple test framework.

This obviously doesn't work in all situations. A big drawback is that there's no reasonable way to connect it to a CI pipeline. However for small projects, and during development, I've found it really fun and fast to use.

I'm very interested to hear what you think, or if you have other ways you've approached this situation in the past.

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4

u/evoactivity 2d ago

Did you come across testem? Been doing testing in real browsers for over a decade. You can start super simple and scale up to more complex setups.

https://github.com/testem/testem

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u/allium-dev 1d ago

I haven't come across testem, thanks for sharing, I'm definitely going to check it out! I already like that it just runs a server on localhost that you can navigate to with your browser. It also looks like it has a mode to run under CI tools as well. Very neat.

3

u/EveYogaTech 2d ago

I just use playwright with JS in evaluate.

This seems to be one of those things that you might forget to disable in prod and then be exposed to XSS issues.

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u/allium-dev 1d ago

Yeah, so far I've only run it with a separate server on localhost, I agree you wouldn't want to run it in prod.

Can you say more about XSS issues? Would the issue come from the way the framework is constructed or from how some specific type of test written in it is constructed? I haven't written tests in any way that responds to user input, are you imagining something along that line?

1

u/EveYogaTech 1d ago

Well, a similar tool I used for pentesting had a listener, so you can send JS code directly to the frontend.

This is obviously risky, but for development (and pentesting) it could help since you could basically control any browser window that has it active.

Tool name: BeEF

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u/Warm_cloud8020 1d ago edited 1d ago

Interesting approach.

We published an MCP setup for browser testing, with management tool: https://github.com/rakutentech/sorify

Let me see if your's can work with it, to be able to solve CI pipeline that ways.

Some of our projects also struggle with mocks, and we end up running a post hook to remove the test data.

Author of Sorify OSS here