Passing a glob to gulp-karma watches individual files and does not catch newly added files

[lazd]

If you pass a glob, say tests/**/*.js, then add files to tests/, they are not included in subsequent test runs as the globs are resolved before being passed to Karma's watch mechanism.

[chrisabrams]

:(

[lazd]

@chrisabrams, I'll be at you soon with a workaround to turn that frown upside down.

[dashed]

Man. I want this so bad.

[koblass]

Why not use the gulp.watch method instead and use the action "run" ? my guess is that it should work

[lazd]

The problem lies in the fact that gulp.src will send a stream of individual File objects, not the actual globs. Karma is doing the actual watching in this case.

@koblass, that would involve an additional task for starting the Karma server, and it was getting a bit ugly when I tried that route before. Will reconsider it, but it's looking like this will end up gulp-friendly and avoid using gulp's src and watch methods completely.

[dashed]

@lazd This may be related to floatdrop/gulp-watch#16 (comment)

[j0hnsmith]

+1

[lazd]

Here's what I've found: I can't get the runner to recognize new files if the server has already been started. In order to make it happen, the server needs to be started/killed on every test run.

The following is currently possible:

var gulp = require('gulp');
var karma = require('gulp-karma');

// Include order
// Could be globs instead
var includeOrder = [
  'client/scripts/todo/todo.js',
  'client/scripts/todo/todo.polyfills.js',
  'client/scripts/todo/todo.util.js',
  'client/scripts/todo/todo.App.js'
];

// Add the tests to the include order
// Uses a glob to catch all tests
var testIncludeOrder = includeOrder.concat(['test/client/*.js']);

// Run tests once
gulp.task('test', function() {
  // The glob is evaluated again, so new files are picked up
  return gulp.src(testIncludeOrder)
    .pipe(karma({
      configFile: 'karma.conf.js',
      action: 'run'
    }));
});

gulp.task('default', function() {
  // Run on start
  gulp.run('test');

  // Run on change
  // This watches on the glob, not the individual files
  gulp.watch(testIncludeOrder, function() {
    return gulp.run('test');
  });
});

This is less than ideal. I'll keep looking for a workaround and will investigate into whether Karma can be patched to fix this, but for now, the above workaround does get the job done.

[j0hnsmith]

Idea, probably not a good one: you can set autoWatch : false in karma.conf.js so each time the gulp watch sees a change it invokes karma with a new list of files (from the glob). I haven't tried but this should work however each time karma starts it opens up browsers, which may take a second or two so this might not be very practical.

Just read the previous commend by @lazd, this is more or less the same suggestion.

[lazd]

gulp-karma is deprecated (#43). Please use Karma directly: https://github.com/karma-runner/gulp-karma