How to test functions with prompts inside of them?

[trymeouteh]

How do I use the @inquirer/testing package to test things like inputs in Inquirer.js? Here is my simple app example that I have...

import { input } from '@inquirer/prompts';

export async function main() {
    let result = await input({ 
        message: 'Name:',
    });

    console.log('Welcome', result);
}

main()

I read the docs on how to test this and I do not understand how to test my main() function by setting the user input to something like "John Doe".

Any help is most appreciated.

[SBoudrias]

Hi, the @inquirer/testing package scope right now really is to test custom prompts; not full fledge app.

That later part is just much more complex. You can for example think of React app tests where the community needed to reimplement the DOM in Javascript (jsdom, happy-dom, etc) to make it possible. Similarly, to reach what you're looking for at a high level, I think we'd need to create a synthetic terminal for integration testing purposes. There's been some discussions on #1529 about this, and you'll see there's a recommendation of a library (I didn't test it myself.)

If your app isn't overly complex, the simplest solution will be to rely on mocking the inquirer prompts.

[trymeouteh]

Thank you for the response. I did add a comment to #1529 on my opinions for making testing easier for CLI apps.