Timer Mocks
The native timer functions (i.e., setTimeout
, setInterval
, clearTimeout
, clearInterval
) are less than ideal for a testing environment since they depend on real time to elapse. Jest can swap out timers with functions that allow you to control the passage of time. Great Scott!
Here we enable fake timers by calling jest.useFakeTimers();
. This mocks out setTimeout and other timer functions with mock functions. If running multiple tests inside of one file or describe block, jest.useFakeTimers();
can be called before each test manually or with a setup function such as beforeEach
. Not doing so will result in the internal usage counter not being reset.
#
Run All TimersAnother test we might want to write for this module is one that asserts that the callback is called after 1 second. To do this, we're going to use Jest's timer control APIs to fast-forward time right in the middle of the test:
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Run Pending TimersThere are also scenarios where you might have a recursive timer -- that is a timer that sets a new timer in its own callback. For these, running all the timers would be an endless loop… so something like jest.runAllTimers()
is not desirable. For these cases you might use jest.runOnlyPendingTimers()
:
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Advance Timers by TimerunTimersToTime
to advanceTimersByTime
in Jest 22.0.0#
renamed from Another possibility is use jest.advanceTimersByTime(msToRun)
. When this API is called, all timers are advanced by msToRun
milliseconds. All pending "macro-tasks" that have been queued via setTimeout() or setInterval(), and would be executed during this time frame, will be executed. Additionally, if those macro-tasks schedule new macro-tasks that would be executed within the same time frame, those will be executed until there are no more macro-tasks remaining in the queue that should be run within msToRun milliseconds.
Lastly, it may occasionally be useful in some tests to be able to clear all of the pending timers. For this, we have jest.clearAllTimers()
.
The code for this example is available at examples/timer.