A simple, terse, in-process reporter for the tape test harness for Node.js.

The Test Anything Protocol (TAP) used by many test harnesses is versatile, but it's not much to look at - or rather, it's too much to look at. There are many custom formatters that work with the tape test harness, but most work by piping process output. This is a useful technique, but interferes with the exit status of the test harness which is a problem in scripts that are meant to fail when tests fail (like npm test). (Though there are workarounds for this, they are shell- and platform-specific.)

Fortunately, tape offers an alternative logging mechanism via its createStream API. This technique is easy to use and runs in-process so it doesn't interfere with the exit status of the test harness. tape-player takes advantage of this to produce a concise test log that's easy to enable.

Install tape-player via:

npm install tape-player --save-dev

And add it to one or more tape-based test files via:

require("tape-player")
// Ignore return value

That's it - run those tests and you'll see nicely formatted output on the standard output device!

tape-player works with the tape CLI or directly in tape-based files (as with node test-file.js).

Example output:

passing test
failing test
  /home/user/project/test/example.js:15:8
  Message:  oops
  Operator: fail
passing test
Tests:    3
Asserts:  5
Failures: 1