How to test a React App, with Jest and react-testing-library

alex adam
2 min readJan 15, 2022

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Prerequisites: An existing React app.

You can find the full source code @ github: https://github.com/alexadam/project-templates/tree/master/projects/react-app-tests

Setup

Install Jest and react-testing-library

yarn add --dev jest @types/jest ts-jest @testing-library/react @testing-library/jest-dom

In the project’s root folder, create a file named jest.config.js and add:

module.exports = {
roots: ["./src"],
transform: {
"^.+\\.tsx?$": "ts-jest"
},
testEnvironment: 'jest-environment-jsdom',
setupFilesAfterEnv: [
"@testing-library/jest-dom/extend-expect"
],
testRegex: "^.+\\.(test|spec)\\.tsx?$",
moduleFileExtensions: ["ts", "tsx", "js", "jsx", "json", "node"]
};

Update package.json by adding a new script entry:

"scripts": {
...
"test": "jest",
...

Create a Test

We’ll test the basic React app created from scratch here: https://alexadam.dev/blog/create-react-project.html

To test the Numbers component, create a file named numbers.test.tsx, in the src folder:

import React, { Props } from "react";
import { fireEvent, render, screen } from "@testing-library/react";
import Numbers from "./numbers";

describe("Test <Numbers />", () => {

test("Should display 42", async () => {
render(<Numbers initValue={42} />);
const text = screen.getByText("Number is 42");
expect(text).toBeInTheDocument();
});

test("Should increment number", async () => {
const { container } = render(<Numbers initValue={42} />)

const incButton = screen.getByText('+')

fireEvent(
incButton,
new MouseEvent('click', {
bubbles: true,
cancelable: true,
}),
)

const text = screen.getByText("Number is 43");
expect(text).toBeInTheDocument();
});

test("Should decrement number", async () => {
const { container } = render(<Numbers initValue={42} />)

const decButton = screen.getByText('-')

fireEvent.click(decButton)

const text = screen.getByText("Number is 41");
expect(text).toBeInTheDocument();
});

});

Run the tests:

yarn test

See the results:

$> yarn test
yarn run v1.22.17
$ jest
PASS src/numbers.test.tsx
Test <Numbers />
✓ Should display 42 (29 ms)
✓ Should increment number (14 ms)
✓ Should decrement number (8 ms)

Test Suites: 1 passed, 1 total
Tests: 3 passed, 3 total
Snapshots: 0 total
Time: 2.893 s
Ran all test suites.
✨ Done in 3.88s.

Originally published at https://alexadam.dev.

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