Easier Debugging of JS tests in Visual Studio with Chutzpah 4.3.0+

If you have a Visual Studio project that uses Chutzpah for JavaScript tests, things recently got a lot easier with a long-awaited update.

Problem

When all tests pass with the Chutzpah test runner everything is fine, but when you need to debug a test, things haven’t been as easy. Debugging the JS code in Visual Studio is something I never got working and never really cared about anyway. The best debugging tool for JavaScript is of course the web browser, but when selecting Open in browser in Visual Studio, Chutzpah has served the HTML test page (Jasmine in my case) through the FILE:/// protocol. If you use fixtures, json files or similar, you’ve had to run the web browser with disabled security.

The path opened in the browser has looked something like this: file:///C:/Workspaces/Development/Apps/CoolProject/JavascriptSpecs/_Chutzpah.32ac122b2d7b8f062865a46153b768fde2c181d4.test.html

As a result of this more tests failed when I started debugging in the browser compared to what the test runner in Visual Studio complained about.

Solution

As of the 4.3.0 release of Chutzpah you can enable the tests to be served through HTTP:// instead, but it isn’t enabled by default. The BrowserArguments I’ve used to disable security can be removed. See Matthew Manela’s post about it for configuration options.

"Server": {
  "Enabled": true
},

"BrowserArguments": { 
  "chrome": "--allow-file-access-from-files --allow-file-access"
}

Now the Open in browser opens a path similar to this: http://localhost:39597/Workspaces/Development/Apps/CoolProject/JavascriptSpecs/_Chutzpah.35722df6731f3d62f68cbf6a873ca82068c8446e.test.html and only the test that should fail, fails.

So, make sure you have the latest version and enable the server mode in Chutzpah.json, then it’s all good. Thank you Matthew for this great improvement!