Status	Active
Author	@dwyde
Created	April 2013
Updated	April 2013
Discussion
Implementation

The HTML notebook currently lacks unit or integration tests. Regression tests would help with potential refactoring, and are generally good to have.

Features to test:

• User interface: toolbars, keyboard shortcuts
• JavaScript code
• Code cell execution
• Code output event handling / rendering
• Text cell (Markdown / LaTeX) rendering

CasperJS is a JavaScript test utility built on top of PhantomJS, a headless WebKit implementation.

• Can test code cell execution from JavaScript
• Multi-page navigation
• xUnit-friendly output option

• Extra software dependencies

Selenium is a web browser automation library with Python bindings. It can be installed with pip.

• Integrates with Python's standard unittest module
• Can test code execution in the kernel

• Tests still need to execute strings of JavaScript, for example, to get text from CodeMirror input areas.
• Relatively slow
• An extra software dependency

Customize whether to run tests in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, etc.

• Use a wrapper script, or a config file

Make the tests aware of a notebook server's URL

• Run a notebook server in a subprocess, and write the port to the test process? This is straightforward with multiprocessing.

QUnit is a JavaScript unit test framework.

• No additional software dependencies: just HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

• Can't easily test executing code in a kernel

• Can it directly test the menubar and other UI elements, or just JavaScript models?

Create an HTML page that includes the notebook's JavaScript, and QUnit's code.

• Inherit a tests page from the notebook.html template, and add an associated handler to the Tornado app

Jasmine is a JavaScript behavior-driven development (BDD) framework. It's a head-to-head competitor with QUnit, modeled after test tools in Ruby on Rails.

Behavior-driven development, if you're a fan.

DOM-less test runner?

Similar to QUnit.

The notebook's regression tests should check that code cell execution works, which is a vote for either CasperJS or Selenium.

CasperJS has less of an impedance mismatch for testing JavaScript - Selenium tests have to write JavaScript code as strings.

• https://github.com/ipython/ipython/pull/1493
• https://github.com/ipython/ipython/issues/2292