The Jest Extended Library
Learn about jest-extended, an open-source library that easily extends our testing toolkit.
We'll cover the following
Expanding our testing toolkit
In addition to the variety of matchers provided to us directly from Jest, there are a number of libraries that extend its functionality with additional matchers. One of the most common is the jest-extended
jest-extended
library, created and maintained by the Jest community. It includes TypeScript support and extends functionality for asserting upon the following:
- Arrays
- Booleans
- Dates
- Functions
- Mocks
- Numbers
- Objects
- Promises
- Strings
- Symbols
We don’t necessarily get new functionality here, so it won’t make Jest do anything that it couldn’t have done before. What it does, though, is create incredible readability and clarity in our tests while removing the burden of crafting the correct assertions for our needs.
Extending expect
Jest’s expect
function has to be extended in order to make these new matchers available for use. We can do this in one of the two ways discussed below.
Inside our test setup file, we can either extend some or all of these new matchers. To extend all matchers from the library, we can add the following lines of code:
import * as matchers from 'jest-extended';
expect.extend(matchers);
To extend only the selected matchers, we can extend them by adding the following lines of code:
import { toBeAfter, toSatisfy, toReject } from 'jest-extended';
expect.extend({ toBeAfter, toSatisfy, toReject });
The preferred method, however, is to automatically extend all matchers via the "jest"
field in our package.json
.
"jest": {
"setupFilesAfterEnv": ["jest-extended/all"]
}
The API
It’s a good idea to read through the complete list of available matchers in the documentation. With options like .toSatisfy(),
which works with custom predicates, .toBeBetween()
for dates, and .toContainAllKeys()
for objects, this library really allows us to be specific and explicit about what exactly we are testing.
You can try some of them out below:
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