Developing Plugins

Karma can be extended through plugins. A plugin is essentially an NPM module. Typically, there are four kinds of plugins: frameworks, reporters, launchers and preprocessors. The best way to understand how this works is to take a look at some of the existing plugins. Following sections list some of the plugins that you might use as a reference.

Frameworks #

• example plugins: karma-jasmine, karma-mocha, karma-requirejs
• use naming convention is karma-*
• use NPM keywords karma-plugin, karma-framework.

Reporters #

• example plugins: karma-growl-reporter, karma-junit-reporter
• use naming convention is karma-*-reporter
• use NPM keywords karma-plugin, karma-reporter

Launchers #

• example plugins: karma-chrome-launcher, karma-sauce-launcher
• use naming convention is karma-*-launcher
• use NPM keywords karma-plugin, karma-launcher

Preprocessors #

• example plugins: karma-coffee-preprocessor, karma-ng-html2js-preprocessor
• use naming convention is karma-*-preprocessor
• user NPM keywords karma-plugin, karma-preprocessor

Crazier stuff #

Karma is assembled by Dependency Injection and a plugin is just an additional DI module (see node-di for more), that can be loaded by Karma. Therefore it can asks for pretty much any Karma component and interact with it. There are couple of plugins that do more interesting stuff like this, check out karma-closure, karma-intellij, karma-dart.