Automated testing

Encore provides a suite of built-in tooling to simplify testing your application.

To run your tests, configure the test command in your package.json to the test runner of your choice, and then use encore test from the CLI. The encore test command sets up all the necessary infrastructure in test mode before handing over to the test runner.

Test Runners

We recommend using Vitest as the test runner. It's very fast, has native support for ESM and TypeScript, and has a built-in compatibility layer for Jest's API.

Integration testing

Since Encore removes almost all boilerplate, most of the code you write is business logic that involves databases and calling APIs between services. Such behavior is most easily tested with integration tests.

When running tests, Encore automatically sets up the databases you need in a separate database cluster. They are additionally configured to skip fsync and to use an in-memory filesystem since durability is not a concern for automated tests.

This drastically reduces the speed overhead of writing integration tests.

In general, Encore applications tend to focus more on integration tests compared to traditional applications that are heavier on unit tests. This is nothing to worry about and is the recommended best practice.

Testing from your IDE

Visual Studio Code (VS Code)

If you're using Vitest, install the official Vitest VS Code extension and then add to the .vscode/settings.json file:

"vitest.commandLine": "encore test"