Unit testing NestJS with Typeorm in memory

Assuming you already configured TypeORM in your NestJS project.
If you need to setup TypeORM, consider reading the awesome NestJS documentation.

For the sake of testing something, I'll setup a simple API that will serve spaceships! You can access the sample repository on github.

Install SQLITE

npm i -D better-sqlite3

A few helpers

Ok, we can write this for every test files BUT we are lazy developers and will not spend our time re-writing the same code over and over and over...

Let's write a simple helper function that will provide an easy to import pre-configured TypeORM module!
src/test-utils/TypeORMSQLITETestingModule.ts

import { TypeOrmModule } from '@nestjs/typeorm';
import { Spaceship } from '../spaceships/spaceship.entity';

export const TypeOrmSQLITETestingModule = () => [
  TypeOrmModule.forRoot({
    type: 'better-sqlite3',
    database: ':memory:',
    dropSchema: true,
    entities: [Spaceship],
    synchronize: true,
  }),
  TypeOrmModule.forFeature([Spaceship]),
];

This one is not mandatory but a simple test dataset is always a nice to have. src/test-utils/testDataset.seed.ts

import { getConnection } from 'typeorm';
import { Spaceship } from '../spaceships/spaceship.entity';

export const testDatasetSeed = async () => {
  const connection = await getConnection();
  const entityManager = connection.createEntityManager();

  entityManager.insert<Spaceship>(Spaceship, {
    name: 'moa',
    type: 'cruiser',
    origin: 'caldari',
  });
  entityManager.insert<Spaceship>(Spaceship, {
    name: 'caracal',
    type: 'cruiser',
    origin: 'caldari',
  });
  entityManager.insert<Spaceship>(Spaceship, {
    name: 'rokh',
    type: 'battleship',
    origin: 'caldari',
  });
};

Using the helpers in a test file

In order to allow tests to use the im memory database, you'll just need to call the function ...TypeOrmSQLITETestingModule() and spread it since it provide the TypeOrmModule.forRoot and TypeOrmModule.forFeature.

Finally, seed the test data (or not) await testDatasetSeed();.

import { Test, TestingModule } from '@nestjs/testing';
import { SpaceshipsService } from './spaceships.service';
import { TypeOrmSQLITETestingModule } from '../test-utils/TypeOrmSQLITETestingModule';
import { testDatasetSeed } from '../test-utils/testDataset.seed';

describe('SpaceshipsService', () => {
  let service: SpaceshipsService;

  beforeEach(async () => {
    const module: TestingModule = await Test.createTestingModule({
      imports: [...TypeOrmSQLITETestingModule()],
      providers: [SpaceshipsService],
    }).compile();

    service = module.get<SpaceshipsService>(SpaceshipsService);
    await testDatasetSeed();
  });

  it('listSpaceships', async () => {
    const spaceships = await service.listSpaceships();
    expect(spaceships).toHaveLength(3);
  });
});

Questions?

I'll be glad to answers questions in the comments.

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And since I'm a nice guy, here, take this sample repo containing a working codebase!
🎁Get the code of the tuto from github

Comments

[Darian Sampare]

Pretty nice trick for testing individual service queries without mocking! Any clue if this approach works for Postgres?

[Antônio Martos Harres]

You can try pg-mem and it can also by used with typeORM
github.com/oguimbal/pg-mem/wiki/Li...

[Julien Prugne]

Looks like what I am looking for to enhance my tests.
I'll give it a try in the evening.
Thanks mate

[Julien Prugne]

From my researches you can't run postgres in memory.
This solution, is not optimal even with mysql more a trick to simplify a bit testing and ci setup.

Imo, you should setup a test db and reset it between tests. You'd be able to test all those neat postgres features. It's more complicated and add some ci setup but should be worth it.

[Mikhail Angelov]

I made a simple lib, wich can help with it github.com/mikhail-angelov/nestjs-...

[Kenneth Suarez]

If we have our entity with created and updated fields, how can we solved using SQLite, as is not suported or there is any kind of workaround?

[Umidjon Tukhtaev]

Can you tell how to unit test typeorm repositories in nestjs