Testing stdout in Node.js using Jest

I’m writing this for all of you who’ve been searching for terms like:

• How to test stdout in Node
• How to spy on stdout in Node using Jest
• How to stub stdout in Node

It took me a day, but thanks to my colleague James Ransome for suggesting the use of Node’s child_process for this, it was fairly easy in the end!

I wanted to test Pino’s output to stdout

Sidenote: I know this counts as testing implementation details of a dependency, but in this case I was working on a custom logger library that wrapped around Pino and did a few additional things. Pino decided to introduce breaking changes in v6.x.x where logging strings and objects like logger.info(string, object) wouldn’t work as expected (they would ignore the second parameter)

The test case essentially was the following:

// when I log multiple params using the logger
logger.info('something1', 'something2');

// then I see this in stdout
{"level":30,"time":1612227699012,"msg":"something1 something2","pid":69753,"hostname":"whatever","v":1}

Once we were able to access the output, we’d be able to JSON.parse() it, and assert against the value of msg in the example above.

The working solution ✅

The solution was to spawn a child process in node, then listen to the EventEmitter on.(‘data’) event to do our assertion.

The setup

Create a file that uses the logger, or whatever code you want to test that logs to stdout.

// logger.js

const logger = require('./logger.js');

logger.info({ foo: 'bar' }, 'param2');

// Outputs:
// {"level":30,"time":1612298595613,"msg":"param2","pid":3039,"hostname":"whatever","foo":"bar","v":1}

The test

const path = require('path');
const { spawn } = require('child_process');

// Run using Jest

describe('logger behaviour', () => {
  it('logs out multiple params - 2 strings', done => {
    const testAppFilePath = path.join(
      __dirname,
      '../logger.js',
    )
    const testApp = spawn('node', [testAppFilePath])
    
    testApp.stdout.on('data', data => {
      const stdoutData = JSON.parse(data.toString())
      expect(stdoutData.msg).toBe('param2')
      expect(stdoutData.foo).toBe('bar')
      testApp.kill('SIGINT')
      done()
    })
  })
});

Quick explanation of what’s going on in the test above

• We set up a logger file that will log things to stdout (logger.js in the example above)
• We spawn a new child process
• We use the newly spawned child process to run node logger.js (which logs things to stdout
• We ‘listen’ to the data being logger using the child_process.stdout.on('data', (data) => <do stuff with data>) pattern.
• We JSON.parse() this data, which lets us assert against values we’re logging out
• Final step: Profit 💲💲💲

Things that we tried that didn’t work 🙅

Initially, we were trying to use the EventEmitter’s .on('data', (callback) => {}) directly without spawning a child process. I’m still quite new to child_process so I’m not sure why this doesn’t work.

Another thing I tried that didn’t work was spying on stdout using Jest. Luckily, I found this recent Jest issue that hinted that this wouldn’t work because of how Jest was written.

Hope this helps you in some way!