Following tutorial, 'TEST-WATCH' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file

testing
1

Hello!

I’m still new to Meteor and testing javascript code in general. I’m currently following the Meteor Todo App with React tutorial and I’ve encountered an error that I don’t seem to be able to fix. I can’t find anybody else having this issue so I presume it is something simple that I overlooked but I can’t find it for the life of me.

I’m running this command in my terminal (Windows 10 cmd):

TEST-WATCH=1 meteor test --driver-package meteortesting:mocha

But I get this as an error:

'TEST-WATCH' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

If I remove TEST-WATCH=1, it runs fine for 3 iterations then I get the tests work and I get this error:

Exited with code: 0
Your application is crashing. Waiting for file change.

For which people say to add TEST-WATCH=1 or --once.

My tests also works completely fine with --once instead, but only runs once and have to manually rerun the test after each modification.

I’ve also tried using the practicalmeteor:mocha package instead, but I get this error:

 Exception while invoking method 'mocha/runServerTests' Error: invalid reporter "[object Object]"

Which for this one I don’t seem to be the only one with this problem, but from what I quickly read it is recommended to use meteortesting:mocha for now.

Anyway, I’d like to know what I can do to fix the TEST_WATCH problem that I have, do you guys have an idea of what could be the problem? I assume I need to install something more so that my environment variable would be set, or I set it manually, but I can’t find any informations on what do install or set.

Thank you!

2

Shot in the dark here as I haven’t used windows since XP :smile:, but you may have to use the set or setx command to specify ENV vars.

C:\path\to\project> setx TEST_WATCH=1

Success: Specified value was saved.

C:\path\to\project> meteor test --driver-package meteortesting:mocha

Some things I have read say you may need to restart your command prompt after running setx.

2 Likes
3

Oh wow that was simple! It worked! Now it run once and waits for modifications. Perfect!

Side note, the command I had to write was slightly different for some reason: setx TEST_WATCH 1, but it works perfectly. So it seems what I needed was to simply have an environment variable named TEST_WATCH of value 1!

My clear lack of knowledge in environment variables is probably why I was pretty much the only one that encountered this problem. So I guess that when you put TEST_WATCH=1 at the beginning of a command sets up an environment variable for that particular execution of that command? Anyway thanks a lot for the help!

1 Like
4

Glad you got it working.

5

This is true for Bash and other *nix shells, but not for windows.

A much simpler option is to put your test command in your package.json as a script and use cross-env for setting environment variables

First, install cross-env as a devDependency:

meteor npm install --save-dev cross-env

Then add the test command (or name it whatever you want, eg test-watch) in your package.json:

    "scripts:" {
        "run": "meteor run",
        "test": "cross-env TEST_WATCH=1 meteor test --driver-package meteortesting:mocha"
    }

Then to run tests in watch mode on Windows, Mac or linux you can run:

npm test
Or if you named the script test-watch: 
npm run test-watch
3 Likes
6

thanks. this is a great tip. I was using set x but cross-env is way bettter

2 Likes
7

somehow cross-env did not work to me(I got a lot of runtime errors) but “setx TEST_WATCH 1” did.

8

Could it be that you were using TEST-WATCH and not TEST_WATCH (with an underscore)?