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Announcing StrykerJS 7.0: Vitest and Tap test runner support

· 6 min read
Nico Jansen
Nico Jansen
Stryker Team

Welcome to the latest major release of StrykerJS, version 7.0!

We are excited to introduce you to 2 new friends: ⚡ Vitest and 📼 Node Tap. There are also some quality-of-life improvements and some (minor) breaking changes.

To update to the latest version of StrykerJS, install @latest as follows:

npm install --save-dev @stryker-mutator/core@latest
# OR
yarn add --dev @stryker-mutator/core@latest

Remember to update Stryker plugins. For example, when using the mocha runner:

npm install --save-dev @stryker-mutator/mocha-runner@latest
# OR
yarn add --dev @stryker-mutator/mocha-runner@latest

If you're new to mutation testing, it's a way to measure your tests' effectiveness. Please take a look at our RoboCoasters 🤖🎢 example and see how even 100% code coverage doesn't tell the whole story. Mutation testing is the only way to know if your tests are any good. In this blog article, we will walk you through the highlights of this release, including new test runners, enhanced options, and important breaking changes.

👩‍👦 New friends​

So why did we choose to add support for ⚡ Vitest and 📼 Node Tap? Well, it is simple, they are both popular.

⚡ Vitest is rapidly growing and is considered the de facto standard for projects using Vite, which in turn, is also rapidly increasing in popularity. As such, it is the new standard for running tests in Vue-based projects and many others. And even though Vitest is rapidly changing (they don't have a v1 release yet), we thought it would be best not to wait any longer, as it was our most upvoted feature request with 40 votes!

The story for 📼 Node Tap is quite different. Node Tap has been a steady and stable test runner for years now. Indeed, we've had an open issue about it since 2017!. Node Tap has some clear design goals, like Test files should be "normal" programs that can be run directly, making it popular with the NodeJS tooling world. You might have heard of some of the tools that are using it: rimraf, json5, tar and even npm itself. Since Node v16, Node ships with a TAP based test runner of its own, which the new plugin also supports!

Without further ado, let's dive in 🏊‍♂️.

⚡ Vitest support​

Vitest is a test runner explicitly designed for the popular Vite build tool. With Stryker 7.0, you can finally use mutation testing for your Vitest projects.

Install it using your favorite package manager:

$ npm i -D @stryker-mutator/vitest-runner
# OR
$ yarn add -D @stryker-mutator/vitest-runner

And configure it with:

{
  "testRunner": "vitest",
  "vitest": {
    "configFile": "vitest.config.js"
  }
}

As you can see, Stryker allows you to configure an alternative config file. Not specifying a config file will honor the vitest defaults, allowing for seamless integration with Vite-powered projects.

This plugin comes with all the StrykerJS features you love, including coverage analysis support and fine-grained test filtering for mutants, which increases performance.

See the vitest runner documentation for more details.

💐 Special thanks go to @odinvanderlinden for implementing the plugin, and sheremet_va for adding programmatic support on the Vitest side ❤.

📼 TAP support​

Node Tap is a test runner specializing in running test files in Node.js and producing TAP (Test Anything Protocol) output.

However, instead of integrating with this test runner, this plugin enables running any test files that produce TAP output. One of these test runners is the new Node Test runner that was added in Node v16.17.0 (experimental) and has been stable since Node v20. Using this concept, Stryker stays close to the TAP design goals: Test files should be "normal" programs that can be run directly

Install the tap runner using your favorite package manager:

$ npm i -D @stryker-mutator/tap-runner
# OR
$ yarn add -D @stryker-mutator/tap-runner

And configure it with:

{
  "testRunner": "tap",
  "tap": {
    "testFiles": ["test/**/*.spec.js"]
  }
}

See the tap runner documentation for more details.

💐 Special thanks go to @danny12321 for implementing this plugin, and isaacs for help in the design ❤

📭 Allow empty​

By default, Stryker will exit with an error when it cannot find any tests. This behavior is excellent for when you've misconfigured Stryker, reminding you to fix the configuration and try again.

In more complex setups, you might extract from the pull request which lines of code were exactly affected and pass only those files to Stryker. In this case, you may intend no tests to run.

To support this scenario, you can now provide --allowEmpty (or equivalent in config file). With this flag enabled, Stryker will exit with a successful exit code (0) when no tests were executed.

💐 Special thanks go to @emir7 for implementing this feature.

🧹 Always clean the temp dir​

StrykerJS works inside a temp directory. What happens to this temp dir depends on the --cleanTempDir setting. This setting now gets a new option: 'always'.

When cleanTempDir is set to 'always', the temp dir is... well... always deleted. This contradicts true (default), where the temp dir is only deleted when StrykerJS runs successfully.

💐 Special thanks go to @adeelpm for implementing this feature.

💥 Breaking Changes​

V7 comes with some more minor but technically-breaking changes. This is the list:

  • #4246 type-checking: disableTypeChecks is now true by default. You can use this configuration to opt out: 
    {
      "disableTypeChecks": "{test,src,lib}/**/*.{js,ts,jsx,tsx,html,vue,cts,mts}"
    }
  • #4234 reporter-api: The event onAllMutantsTested has been removed. Plugin creators should use onMutationTestReportReady instead.
  • #4171 esm: Deep (and undocumented) imports from @stryker-mutator/core or one of the plugins will no longer work. If you want to import something that's not available, please let us know by opening an issue
  • #4105 node: Node 14 is no longer supported. Please install an LTS version of node

🔮 What's next​

With v7 out the door, we will closely monitor any issues that might pop up with these new plugins. So if you have an issue, please don't hesitate to let us know by reporting it.

Next, we will be focussing on getting the real-time HTML report working for StrykerJS and progress support for mutating .svelte files.

In the medium term, we will focus on improving the mutating environment in general. The long-awaited ignore plugin comes to mind. We also would love for some mutators to be less noisy by only inserting mutants if no other mutants are inserted.

In the meantime, we would love to hear from you! So please voice your feedback in the comment section below 👇, on our slack channel or by sending a tweet.