ReferenceError: describe is not defined

Hello,

I’m currently using mocha v2.3.4, chai, and es6 with babel 6 and running in node v5.3.0.

This is my test script that I run with npm: mocha --compilers js:babel-core/register --require ./test/test_helper.js --recursive

I have mocha globally installed, but whenever I run the test script I get the following output in my terminal:

ReferenceError: describe is not defined

Does anyone have any Ideas for why this may be happening?

Issue Analytics

State:
Created 8 years ago
Comments:10 (6 by maintainers)

Top GitHub Comments

2reactions

boneskullcommented, Jun 7, 2017

mocha is a wrapper around node. _mocha is the “real” executable. try ts-babel-node _mocha <mocha options>

2reactions

mhdatiecommented, Jun 7, 2017

I would like to open the same issue again. I’m upgrading an existing node project to Typescript. I’m receiving the same error when trying to run mocha for the following project specs:

Node
Typescript
ES6

I have all the @types needed installed (mocha, chai, node, supertest, etc) and adding the @types directory to the typeRoots of the TS compiler options in .tsconfig.json. This way I don’t have to do import "mocha" at the beginning of my test

I have also installed ts-babel-node which sits on top of ts-node to transpile ES6 to ES5 in Node Typescript projects. This is working fine, however, it’s unable to recognize describe during runtime only. The compiler is referencing the @types/mocha 's describe() definition but not when I run the tests.

.babelrc is defined too

Running the main app with ts-babel-node src/server.ts runs fine

Running tests with mocha -r ts-babel-node/bin/ts-babel-node test/test.ts fails in reading the describe() method.

I also tried running mocha --compilers js:ts-babel-node/bin/ts-babel-node test/test.ts

but with no luck.

Any tips would be appreciated

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