How do Atom's 'spec' files work?

Question

I'm making a package for Atom, and Travis CI keeps telling me my build failed.
Update: I created a blank spec file and now my builds are passing.

You can see my package here: https://travis-ci.org/frayment/language-jazz

The console is telling me:

sh: line 105: ./spec: No such file or directory  
Missing spec folder! Please consider adding a test suite in

I went looking around at Atom packages on GitHub for 'spec' files and they seem to be CoffeeScript based, but I can't understand what on earth they contain. There isn't much documentation on the subject, so:

What is a 'spec' file, and what do I put in it?

Help is very appreciated.

Answer 1

The ./spec directory should contain one or more Jasmine Specifications for the Atom Package you are developing, for example, this spec is taken from the Atom documentation:

describe "when a test is written", ->
  it "has some expectations that should pass", ->
    expect("apples").toEqual("apples")
    expect("oranges").not.toEqual("apples")

One of the biggest challenges with Open Source software is maintaining quality when a large number of individual contributors are providing code, one solution to this is providing a high level of test coverage:

Like most aspects of programming, testing requires thoughtfulness. TDD is a very useful, but certainly not sufficient, tool to help you get good tests. If you are testing thoughtfully and well, I would expect a coverage percentage in the upper 80s or 90s. I would be suspicious of anything like 100% - it would smell of someone writing tests to make the coverage numbers happy, but not thinking about what they are doing.

In Atom's case, all of the specifications are added to the ./spec folder and must end with -spec.coffee, so for example if you were creating a package named awesome and your code sat within /awesome.coffee then you spec would be ./spec/awesome.coffee. Your spec should exercise the key areas of your code to give you confidence when committing pull requests to your master branch.

I have a couple of packages on Atom.io and both of these have tests included with them, you are welcome to use these as concrete examples of how Jasmine 1.3 tests can be written to support the functionality of your packages. Equally the majority of packages on Atom.io also have a set of tests that you can draw upon to build your own test suite.