Comparison with native node test runner

[philly-vanilly]

How does vitest compare to 'node:test'?

The docs don't mention the new node native test runner, which seems to be the new way of doing testing https://www.sitepoint.com/node-js-20-new/

Other runtimes took an alternative view and offered built-in tools considered essential for development. Deno, Bun, Go, and Rust all offer built-in test runners. Developers have a default choice but can opt for an alternative when their project has specific requirements.

Would be nice if someone with in-depth knowledge wrote something about the advantages/disadvantages/use-cases of each

[f15u]

At the moment of writing, with the current Node LTS (v20), the test runner does not support glob patterns. This is a deal breaker for us.

We run node with tsimp (node --import=tsimp/import) for compiling typescript and we have **/*.spec.ts files.

[vorant94]

there is a new built-in glob API (that is experimental, but still)

combining it with test run API and you can have a small wrapper script that runs built-in test runner on a glob-filtered list of files

[glokta1]

Node LTS (v22) supports glob pattern arguments in the test runner. See: https://nodejs.org/docs/latest-v22.x/api/test.html#running-tests-from-the-command-line

I'm running the following command to execute all tests in my project:
node --test --require ts-node/register "**/*.test.ts"

Note: The double quotes around the globs are important for portability as specified in the docs.

[vorant94]

maybe matter of taste or something, but for me it was tests output format (especially when some tests are failing), that made me to stick with vitest instead of built-in test runner... it just gets to much noisy as of now with all the stack traces that are thrown into stdout by built-in one