Comprehensive Guide to Mocha Reporters: Types and Uses

In this tutorial we will take a look at reporter in mocha. The mocha reporters will adjust to the terminal window, and it will always disable ANSI-escape coloring when the stdio streams are associated with a TTY.

Spec

Spec is the default reporter in mocha. The "spec" reporter will output a hierarchical view nested just as the test case are.

Dot matrix

The dot matrix (or "dot") reporter is simply a series of characters that represent test cases. The failures will be highlighted in red exclamation marks, pending tests will be with a blue comma, while slow tests will be in yellow. This is good if you prefer minimal output.

Nyan

The "nyan" reporter is exactly what you would expect:

Tap

The TAP reporter will emit lines for a Test-Anything-Protocol consumer.

Landing strip

The landing Strip (landing) reporter is a gimmicky test reporter that stimulates a plane landing unicode ftw

List

The "list" reporter will output a simple specifications list as test cases pass or fail, it outputs the failure details at the bottom of the output.

Progress

The "progress" reporter will implement a simple progress-bar:

Json

The "JSON" reporter will output a single JSON object when the tests have completed (failures or not).

Json stream

The "JSON stream" reporter will output newline-delimited JSON "events" as they occur, it begins with a "start" event, followed by failures or passes, and then final a final "end" event.

Min

The "min" reporter will display the summary only, while it still outputs errors on failure. This reporter will work great with -watch as it clears the terminal in order to keep your test summary at the top.

Doc

The "doc" reporter will output a hierarchical HTML body representation of your tests. You should wrap with a header, footer, and some styling, then you will have some fantastic documentation!

For instance, if you have the following JavaScript:

describe('Array', function() {
  describe('#indexOf()', function() {
    it('it should return -1 when the value is not present', function() {
      [1, 2, 3].indexOf(5).should.equal(-1);
      [1, 2, 3].indexOf(0).should.equal(-1);
    });
  });
});

The command mocha ?reporter doc array will yied:

<section class="suite">
  <h1 >Array </h1 >
   <dl >
     <section class="suite" >
       <h1 >#indexOf() </h1 >
       <dl >
         <dt >it should return -1 when the value is not present </dt >
         <dd >
           <pre > <code >[1,2,3].indexOf(5).should.equal(-1);
[1,2,3].indexOf(0).should.equal(-1); </code > </pre >
         </dd >
       </dl >
     </section >
   </dl >
 </section >

Markdown

The "markdown" reporter will generate a markdown TOC and body for your test suites. This is great if you wish to use the tests as documented within a Github wiki page, or a markdown file in the repository that Github will be able to render.

The xunit reporter is also available. It will output an XUnit-compatible XML document, often applicable in CI servers.

By default, it outputs to the console. If you want to write directly to a file, you should use --reporter-options output=filename.xml.

If you want to specify custom report title, you should use --reporter-options suiteName="Custom name".

Third-party reporters

Mocha enables you to define custom reporters.

Html reporters

It is not intended for use HTML reporter on the command-line.