Re:Modern Node.js Patterns
by serguzest on Sunday August 03, 2025 @05:27PM
(#44779984)
I love Node's built-in testing and how it integrates with VSCode's test runner. But I still miss Jest matchers. The Vitest team ported Jest matchers for their own use. I wish there were a similar compatibility between Jest matchers and Node testing as well.
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Currently for very small projects I use the built in NodeJS test tooling.
But for larger and more complex projects, I tend to use Vitest these days. At 40MBs down, and most of the dependency weight falling to Vite (33MBs and something I likely already have installed directly), it's not too heavy of a dependency.
It is based on vite and a bundler has no place in my backend. Vite is based on roll-up, roll-up uses some other things such as swc. I want to use typescript projects and npm workspaces which vite doesn't seem to care about.
assertions in node test feel very "technically correct but kind of ugly" compared to jest, but I'll use it anyway
yes but consider this Jest code, replicating such in node testing is painful. testing code should be DSL-like, should be very easy to read.
expect(bar).toEqual(
expect.objectContaining({
symbol: `BTC`,
interval: `hour`,
timestamp: expect.any(Number),
o: expect.any(Number),
h: expect.any(Number),
l: expect.any(Number),
c: expect.any(Number),
v: expect.any(Number)
})
);