In Tired of setting up JavaScript environments? I explained how I use npm to configure a working environment, where all Babel and editor related configuration files are automatically created with my defaults.

I decided to go a step further and updated project mai-chai to version 2.

Now, adding mai-chai to a project with:

1npm install --save-dev mai-chai

automatically includes mocha and chai.

It also creates a ./test folder with mocha.opts and the test-helper.js helper file (which gets required automatically into every test file), so that window and document globals are available in the test environment.

My good friend Wallaby

I am also using Wallaby.js extensively from both the atom and the Visual Studio Code editors. Wallaby.js needs a configuration file which describes where the source is located, what should be run as tests and some gory startup code needed to work well with React and with require-self.

Since v2 of mai-chai, a preconfigured wallaby.conf.js file is automatically copied to the root of the project. For this to work, the project has to adhere to the following conventions:

• ./src contains the source code of the project.
• ./src.test contains the tests for the project.
• ./test contains the configuration for mocha.

Artifacts get compiled by Babel and copied to ./lib (for the source) and ./lib.test (for the tests).

Starting a new project

My process for creating a new project now looks like this:

1cd foo
2npm init
3npm install --save-dev generic-js-env babel-env mai-chai

To see a basic example of such a project, where I have added manually:

• .gitignore
• ./src/index.js
• ./src.test/index.js

can be found here.