Include dependencies in Karma test file for Angular app?

In karma configuration file (karma.conf.js) you need to define all libraries.

etc.

    // list of files / patterns to load in the browser
    files: [
        'app/lib/angular/angular.js',
        'app/lib/angular-route/angular-route.js',
        'test/lib/angular-mocks.js',
        'app/app.js',
        'app/controllers/*.js',
        'app/services/*.js',
        'app/*',
        'test/spec/**/*.js'
    ],

Had a similar problem and my solution (inspired someway by @danba comment) was to load the scripts in the files in the exact same order as they were loaded in the index.html. In my case globbing patterns like app/scripts/**/*.js were causing trouble to karma which constantly threw errors.

Maybe not the most elegant solution to copy all the scripts definitions but worked in the end so my test could finally get back running. Hope it helps.

EDIT: Editing this because today I probably (and hopefully) got the hang of what was going wrong here. So it seems that Karma does not like globbing patterns when the same module is defined in one file and used in many different files. Let's say that your folder structure is like this:

Suppose that in AuthService.js you have your module definition for all your services in that folder, so that that file starts with:

angular.module('myApp.services', [
  'myApp.urls',
  'ngCookies'
])

Then in all the other files you're just attaching other services to that same module. In the picture tokenService.js would start with:

angular.module('myApp.services');

If everything stays this way everything will probably work. But if by any chance I define the module the other way round, so the module definition is not anymore in the first file of that folder but on another that Karma reads after AuthService then it will throw an error and refuse to complete the tests.

Solution 1

A solution might be to put the module definition in its own file, starting with an underscore. Finally, let all the siblings files depend on that one(s). So the above folder structure should be:

Solution 2

Another - probably better - solution is to mark the files where the modules are defined with a common suffix/extension for example service.module.js while the files that depend on it could be named normally like authService.js, tokenService.js. The Karma configuration at that point will become something like:

// list of files / patterns to load in the browser
files: [
    'app/lib/angular/angular.js',
    'test/lib/angular-mocks.js',
    'app/app.js',
    'app/**/*.module.js', // <-- first the module definitions...
    'app/**/*.js', // <-- ..then all the other files
    'test/spec/**/*.js'
],

This way karma will load the modules definitions first and then those file that depend on them.

I also had the same issue, in my case problem occured because there were several files per module which is a bad practice since we can point to not initialized module. Solved this by including just one file per module.

Always load the non minified version of angular into karma. it will display errors and help you better to find out what to change. In your case, it's the order of the files being loaded by karma.