FAQs

How is Japa different from Jest or Vitest?

Jest and Vitest are born out of the frontend ecosystem. Therefore a lot of tooling in their ecosystems focuses mainly on the front end.

Also, both frameworks use transpilers to transform your JavaScript code before executing it. Jest uses babel and Vitest uses Vite.

On the other hand, Japa focuses only on testing the backend applications and libraries written for the Node.js runtime. As a result:

• We do not transpile or bundle your code since there is no need to do that.
• The ecosystem plugins are more focused on the backend. For example, we have official plugins for testing API endpoints and server-rendered applications.

Apart from these fundamental differences, Japa features like Datasets, re-imagined lifecycle hooks shines on their own.

Why does Japa not have a file watcher?

Japa is meant to blend with your existing workflow vs. shipping its development tools.

If you already have a backend application, you might be using some file watcher to restart the development server. We encourage you to use the same watcher to re-run tests on file change.