Testing with Jest in a node and ReactJS monorepo (and getting rid of environment.teardown error)

Big number of the applications we develop have at least one ReactJS UI, that is held in one repo and an API, held in another. If we need to reuse some part of the code, we do so by moving it to another repository and adding it as a git submodule

For our latest project we decided to give the monorepo approach a try (which we didn’t come to a conclusion yet if it better fits our needs). The project is a node.js API with a ReactJS app, that is based on create-react-app

This first issue we faced with it was with testing the node app – tests ran just fine in the react application (/app/) but if you tried to run it for the server, you’d get the following error:

● Test suite failed to run
TypeError: environment.teardown is not a function

  at ../node_modules/jest-runner/build/run_test.js:230:25

In our package.json we had the trivial test definition – just running jest:

"scripts": {
    ...
    "test": "jest"
    ...
}

We didn’t had issue with this approach in a node API with no CRA app in it, so as it turned out to be the case, we had to indicate that the environment is node.

To do so we added a testconfig.json and added it to the script in the package.json

testconfig.json

{
	"testEnvironment": "node"
}

package.json

{
	"scripts": {
		"test": "jest --config=testconfig.json"
	}
}

If you want jest to monitor your files, change the “test’ script to “jest –watchAll –config=testconfig.json”