JAjamiehewitt·Sep 9, 2024
Mocha js testing framework is widely used and maintained by a small team https://github.com/mochajs/mocha/issues/5027
In Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?mochajs
mocha
JavaScript2011–2024
mochajs / mocha
mocha
☕️ Classic, reliable, trusted test framework for Node.js and the browser
15Distinct people
15Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
22.9KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
☕️ Classic, reliable, trusted test framework for Node.js and the browser
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year15 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2011-11-23 21:49:57 UTC to 2024-09-09 08:47:04 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
15 sourcesMocha is being maintained again
2 points · Open discussionFamous Node developer (TJ) asked to delete all his commits
2 points · Open discussionNope, it's stalled. Last expense was from May '21. TJ Holowaychuk, one of the former core contributors, was frustrated about this specifically[0].
There seems to be no additional access to issue invoices to the OC except for the current owner - at least, that's what it sounds like.
[0] https://github.com/mochajs/mocha/issues/4467
In The MochaJS Open Collective has $63,000 just sitting theretape is a good pick, thanks!
i've been using mocha, just b/c it's the most popular, and tho it's not bad, i dislike that even in programmatic[.] usage, one generally doesn't import tests as a "module" object. somehow it just doesn't jibe w/ notions of code reuse, even if it hasn't become much of a problem in practice. anyway, i got curious about how to do this, started reading the source, and at a cursory glance, it looked like reading in tests as files was baked in pretty deep.
[.]https://github.com/mochajs/mocha/wiki/Using-mocha-programmat...
In From Karma to Mocha, with a taste of jsdomThat's how the amazing TJ Holowaychuk declares his imports.
https://github.com/mochajs/mocha/blob/master/lib/suite.js
In W3C HTML JSON form submissionThis is a really interesting analysis.
From these graphs we could come up with some reasonable boundaries. Packages that:
- have more than one version: 71853
- are over two weeks old: 42106
- had a new release in the last 360 days: 71277
There are 31888 packages satisfying all three conditions above. Though it’s only one third of all packages there, the amount is still enormous.
Now, if only I could search those 31,888 packages on NPM alone if I wanted to.
EDIT: By the way, for anybody reading this article not familiar with the JavaScript ecosystem, this is interesting:
Mocha is clearly the most popular test framework, while nodeunit is way behind. And no-one seems to use Jasmine.
Jasmine appears to be unpopular within the JavaScript community but in reality that just accounts for those in the NodeJS and,
Read the rest
more recently, the subset of the front-end JS community who use NodeJS tools in their projects.
Mocha, the most popular test framework, has been a Node module since late 2011 [0], whereas Jasmine has only been one since mid-2013 [1]. I have a hunch that the majority of Jasmine users aren't on-board with the movement of front-end JS and NodeJS ecosystems merging, and since Jasmine [3] doesn't really aim itself at NodeJS projects, it's far less likely to be used in any project which uses NPM for dependency management.
Not really that important, just interesting :)
[0]: https://github.com/visionmedia/mocha/commits/master/package....
[1]: https://github.com/pivotal/jasmine/commits/master/package.js...
[2]: https://github.com/pivotal/jasmine
author here:
Pioneer uses cucumber and Pioneer for its tests, you are correct. We also have a suite of unit tests that are powered by mocha.
Since we wanted true integration tests we choice to use Pioneer to test Pioneer. We wanted our feature files to act as documentation thus Cucumber was a clear choice.
As far as precedence goes ... This is not an uncommon pattern
Mocha uses mocha to test
https://github.com/visionmedia/mocha/blob/master/test/http.m...
In Pioneer.js – JavaScript Integration Testing DSLA couple suggestions:
callback hell -- 1) Define your callback functions instead of passing anonymous functions everywhere. 2) Use a control flow library like async. https://npmjs.org/package/async This will greatly help in complex scenarios and the "waterfall" mode is particularly useful to accomplish something similar to chaining where values flow through multiple functions. Callback hell is not really an issue for most people after looking into these two things.
data manipulation -- https://npmjs.org/package/lodash lodash is a fast functional utility library that makes it much easier to do the everyday data manipulation tasks. I pretty much assume this will be a dependency whenever I start a non-trivial project now.
lack of standards -- Most people who really like node.js see this as a feature not a bug. This definitely drives away ma
Read the rest
ny people, but the intention is to promote as much choice as possible. Node.js people tend to be obsessed with choice and modularity. This is not meant as "you should think this way too" type explanation, but just a rough description of how the community is, good or bad. That being said, there are some standards out there. For example Felix's style guide is followed pretty well throughout the community (with a couple notable exceptions such as some of TJ Holowaychuk's stuff) http://nodeguide.com/style.html.
mocha output -- It appears you have your reporter option set to "spec". This is a great reporter for visualizing a set of features, but for integration with something like Jenkins, I would recommend "tap" instead. It is also pretty trivial to write your own reporter, and then you can get whatever type of output you want. https://github.com/visionmedia/mocha/wiki/Third-party-report...
mocha integration testing -- I agree that the example you showed was more of an integration test than a unit test. Mocha is not really doing anything to discourage unit testing though, and I would note that integration tests can be valuable. If it were me, I would tend to have my unit tests working against the actual module, instead of an endpoint, which is kind of sloppy.
I hope that helps though :) I know it is often frustrating coming into a new language ecosystem, especially a "friendly-anarchy" oriented one like node.js.
Support for parallel suites on mocha
2 points · Open discussionWe use a whole bunch, some of the main ones:
- async => helpful async library https://github.com/caolan/async
- nodeinspector => node js debugging in a nice webkit UI https://github.com/dannycoates/node-inspector
- riakjs => for talking to Riak: http://riakjs.org/
- knox => S3 helper https://github.com/LearnBoost/knox
- optimist => helper lib for writing command line node apps (no more bash :) https://github.com/substack/node-optimist
- mocha => unit testing node code https://github.com/visionmedia/mocha
- emailjs => email helper https://github.com/eleith/emailjs
- uglifyjs => code minification https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS
In Show HN: clipboard.com, the best way to save anything onlinerequest - https://github.com/mikeal/request
jsontool - https://github.com/trentm/json
mocha - https://github.com/visionmedia/mocha
stream - http://nodejs.org/api/stream.html
txn - https://github.com/iriscouch/txn
follow - https://github.com/iriscouch/follow
browserify - https://github.com/substack/node-browserify
fleet - https://github.com/substack/fleet
seaport - https://github.com/substack/seaport
underscore - https://github.com/documentcloud/underscore
node_redis - https://github.com/mranney/node_redis
node-gyp - https://github.com/TooTallNate/node-gyp
cookies - https://github.com/jed/cookies
node-falafel - http://github.com/substack/node-falafel
routes - https://github.com/aaronblohowiak/routes.js
negotiator - https://github.com/federomero/negotiator
marked - https://github.com/chjj/marked
JSONStream - https://github.com/dominictarr/J
Read the rest
SONStream
tap - https://github.com/isaacs/node-tap
event-stream - https://github.com/dominictarr/event-stream
There are some good testing libraries for node (eg. https://github.com/visionmedia/mocha, by the same author as Express), that make async testing fairly painless. However, there are things like DB setup/teardown that aren't integrated and you might be used to getting "for free" with other frameworks (eg. Django). I'm curious to hear what the parent commenter has found to be a roadblock.
In Express 3.0.0 alpha1 and Express 4.x RoadmapMocha - simple, flexible, fun js test framework for node.js & the browser
1 points · Open discussion