Building and Testing TypeORM

This document describes how to set up your development environment and run TypeORM test cases.

Prerequisite Software
Getting the Sources
Installing NPM Modules
Building
Running Tests Locally

See the contribution guidelines if you'd like to contribute to TypeORM.

Prerequisite Software

Before you can build and test TypeORM, you must install and configure the following products on your development machine:

Git and/or the GitHub app (for Mac or Windows); GitHub's Guide to Installing Git is a good source of information.
Node.js, (better to install latest version) which is used to run a development web server, run tests, and generate distributable files. Depending on your system, you can install Node either from source or as a pre-packaged bundle.
Mysql is required to run tests on this platform (or docker)
MariaDB is required to run tests on this platform (or docker)
Postgres is required to run tests on this platform (or docker)
Oracle is required to run tests on this platform
Microsoft SQL Server is required to run tests on this platform
For MySQL, MariaDB and Postgres you can use docker instead (docker configuration is here)

Getting the Sources

Fork and clone the repository:

Login to your GitHub account or create one by following the instructions given here.
Fork the main TypeORM repository.
Clone your fork of the TypeORM repository and define an upstream remote pointing back to the TypeORM repository that you forked in the first place.

# Clone your GitHub repository:
git clone git@github.com:<github username>/typeorm.git

# Go to the TypeORM directory:
cd typeorm

# Add the main TypeORM repository as an upstream remote to your repository:
git remote add upstream https://github.com/typeorm/typeorm.git

Installing NPM Modules

Install all TypeORM dependencies by running this command:

npm install

ORM config

To create an initial ormconfig.json file, run the following command:

cp ormconfig.sample.json ormconfig.json

Building

To build a distribution package of TypeORM run:

npm run package

This command will generate a distribution package in the build/package directory. You can link (or simply copy/paste) this directory into your project and test TypeORM there (but make sure to keep all node_modules required by TypeORM).

To build the distribution package of TypeORM packed into a .tgz, run:

npm run pack

This command will generate a distribution package tar in the build directory (build/typeorm-x.x.x.tgz). You can copy this tar into your project and run npm install ./typeorm-x.x.x.tgz to bundle your build of TypeORM in your project.

Running Tests Locally

It is greatly appreciated if PRs that change code come with appropriate tests.

To create a new test, check the relevant functional tests. Depending on the test, you may need to create a new test file or modify an existing one.

If the test is for a specific regression or issue opened on GitHub, add a comment to the tests mentioning the issue number.

Most tests will benefit from using this template as a starting point:

import "reflect-metadata";
import { createTestingConnections, closeTestingConnections, reloadTestingDatabases } from "../../utils/test-utils";
import { DataSource } from "../../../src/data-source/DataSource"
import { expect } from "chai";

describe("description of the functionality you're testing", () => {

    let dataSources: DataSource[];
    before(async () => dataSources = await createTestingConnections({
        entities: [__dirname + "/entity/*{.js,.ts}"],
        schemaCreate: true,
        dropSchema: true,
    }));
    beforeEach(() => reloadTestingDatabases(dataSources));
    after(() => closeTestingConnections(dataSources));

    // optional: test fix for issue https://github.com/typeorm/typeorm/issues/<issue-number>
    it("should <put a detailed description of what it should do here>", () => Promise.all(dataSources.map(async dataSource => {
       // tests go here
    })));

// you can add additional tests if needed
});

If you place entities in ./entity/<entity-name>.ts relative to your test file, they will automatically be loaded.

To run the tests, setup your environment configuration by copying ormconfig.sample.json into ormconfig.json and replacing parameters with your own. The tests will be run for each database that is defined in that file. If you're working on something that's not database specific and you want to speed things up, you can pick which objects in the file make sense for you to keep.

Run the tests as follows:

npm test

You should make sure the test suites pass before submitting a PR to GitHub. Tests are run on PRs via GitHub Actions after approval, but your fork repository should be able to run CI as well. All tests need to pass before a PR will be merged.

Executing only some tests: When you are creating tests to some specific code, you may want to only execute the tests that you're creating.

To do this, you can temporarily modify your test definitions by adding .only mocha commands to describe and it. For example:

describe.only('your describe test', ....)

Alternatively, you can use the --grep flag to pass a regex to mocha. Only the tests that have describe/it statements that match the regex will be run. For example:

npm run test -- --grep "your test name"

Faster developer cycle for editing code and running tests

The npm run test script works by deleting built TypeScript code, rebuilding the codebase, and then running tests. This can take a long time.

Instead, for a quicker feedback cycle, you can run npm run compile -- --watch to make a fresh build and instruct TypeScript to watch for changes and only compile what code you've changed.

Once TypeScript finishes compiling your changes, you can run npm run test:fast (instead of test), to trigger a test without causing a full recompile, which allows you to edit and check your changes much faster.

Using Docker

To run your tests you need the Database Management Systems (DBMS) installed on your machine. Alternatively, you can use docker with the DBMS running in containers. To have docker run all the DBMS for you simply run docker-compose up in the root of the project. Once all images are fetched and are running, you can run the tests.

The docker image of mssql-server needs at least 3.25GB of RAM.
Make sure to assign enough memory to the Docker VM if you're running on Docker for Mac or Windows

Release Process

To create a new release, follow these steps:

Create a new branch from master with the format release-x.x.x (e.g. release-0.3.23).
Update the version in package.json and run npm install to update the lock file.
Run the npm run changelog command to generate the changelog for the new version.
Commit the changes and create a pull request to merge the release branch into master.
Once the pull request is approved and merged, create a new release on GitHub with the same version number.
The publish-package.yml script will then run a GitHub Actions workflow that will publish the new version to npm.

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