Jest 26: Tick Tock

May 5, 2020

When we started rebuilding Jest five years ago our goal was to provide a batteries-included zero-configuration test runner that is approachable for beginners, extensible for almost all testing use cases and scalable to large projects. One of the instrumental releases was Jest 15 which tied everything together and provided good defaults that allowed people to run Jest often without any setup. However, this approach has a big downside as Jest installs a lot of dependencies into your projects that you may not need.

We are now beginning to address this shortcoming and are working on reducing Jest’s install size while keeping it approachable and extensible. We have made the following breaking changes in Jest 26:

Jest 25: 🚀 Laying foundations for the future

January 21, 2020

Simen Bekkhus

Jest 25 is laying the groundwork for many major changes in the future. As such, we kept breaking changes to a minimum, but internal architecture changes may require attention during the upgrade. The main changes are an upgrade of JSDOM from v11 to v15, 10-15% faster test runs, a new diff view for outdated snapshots and dropped Node 6 support.

There has been more than 200 commits since Jest 24.9 by more than 80 different contributors, so as always, take a look at the changelog for a full list of changes.

Jest 24: 💅 Refreshing, Polished, TypeScript-friendly

January 25, 2019

Simen Bekkhus

Today we are happy to announce the next major release of Jest - version 24! It's been 4 months since the last minor release, and 8 months since Jest 23, so this upgrade is a big one, with something for everyone! Highlights include built-in support for TypeScript by upgrading the Jest internals to Babel 7, fixing some long-standing issues with missing console output and performance issues when computing large diffs, and a brand new sparkling website. ✨

For a full list of all changes see the changelog.

Supporting Jest Open Source

June 27, 2018

Rick Hanlon II

Jest is maintained by a community of open source contributors and Facebook employees.

Our open source contributors work on behalf of the community to create new features, fix bugs, and maintain the issue backlog. Facebook employees do the same, focused on the problems specific to Facebook's scale, and run all proposed releases on Facebook's enormous test suite before publishing.

All of us do our part to make testing delightful.

At the Jest Summit we announced the Jest Open Collective. This is our way to help support the efforts of the open source Jest community. To be absolutely clear: Facebook employees cannot benefit from the Jest Open Collective. The collective's sole purpose is to support the open source side of the Jest community.

In this post we'll outline what the Jest Open Collective is, the structure, and the goals we have.

Jest 23: 🔥 Blazing Fast Delightful Testing

May 29, 2018

Rick Hanlon II

Today we are excited to announce Jest 23, our largest major release to date! Together with over 100 contributors, we've shipped a ton of features and bug fixes. Thank you to everyone in the community for helping make JavaScript Testing Delightful.

We would also like to welcome both Babel and Webpack to the Jest community! After converting from Mocha to Jest 23 Beta, Webpack saw their total test suite time reduced 6x from over 13 minutes to 2 minutes 20 seconds. #blazingmeansgood

Here's are some of the Jest 23 highlights and breaking changes.

Jest 22: Refinements & Custom Runners

December 18, 2017

Simen Bekkhus

Today we are announcing a new major version of Jest which refines almost all parts of Jest to provide a more solid testing foundation. Together with the Jest community we made a number of changes across the board that will help you get more out of Jest. We are also graduating the custom runners feature out of the experimental stage and added a new package, jest-worker, for parallelizing work across multiple processes. We have compiled a list of highlights below but make sure to check out the (as always) massive changelog.

Jest 20: 💖 Delightful Testing & 🏃🏽 Multi-Project-Runner

May 6, 2017

Christoph Nakazawa

A few months ago we announced Jest 19 which came with major new features and was the biggest Jest release until today. Jest 20 has twice the amount of changes compared to the previous version, features a complete rewrite of the test runner, adds new testing APIs. The new release enables a new level of customization and configuration for projects all while making it effortless to upgrade. Beyond Painless JavaScript Testing, we believe Jest is now delivering a Delightful JavaScript Testing experience. Let's take a look at the best new features and changes in depth:

Multi-Project-Runner & Configuration Overhaul

Until now, Jest could only operate in one project at a time. This is often cumbersome if you are working on many smaller projects that each have their own setup and configuration. With Jest 20, we rewrote the test runner completely to run many projects at the same time within a single instance of Jest, for example if you are working on a React frontend and a node.js backend. Here is a video of Jest running tests for React, Relay, Yarn and Jest all at the same time:

multi-runner

🃏 Jest 19: Immersive Watch Mode & Test Platform Improvements

February 21, 2017

Rogelio Guzman

Today we are pleased to ship version 19 of the Jest testing platform. It's the biggest Jest release we have shipped so far and we are quite excited to show you what we've built over the last two months:

Immersive Watch Mode

We completely rewrote the watch mode to make it instant and more extensible. As a result, the experience of using it really is immersive: tests re-run instantly after a file change and we made it easy to select the right tests.

A Great Developer Experience

January 30, 2017

Héctor Ramos

We strongly believe that great documentation is crucial to providing a great developer experience. The docs should be clear, concise, and useful to new users and veterans alike. With that in mind, we recently took some time to overhaul the Jest website.

Improved docs

One of the changes you'll notice upon visiting our docs is the updated sidebar. The documentation is now divided into three main areas: an introduction to Jest, detailed guides to Jest's features, and a comprehensive API reference.

The Introduction section will guide you from installing Jest and writing your first case, to using Jest's matchers and testing async code. If you're new to Jest or need a quick refresher, these docs should get you up to speed in no time. If you've used Jest before and only need a quick reference on how it's installed, you need to go no further than the Getting Started guide.

Once you feel comfortable using Jest, proceed to the advanced Guides section. The new Snapshot Testing guide covers everything you need to know about creating and maintaining snapshot test cases.

Finally, we've completely overhauled our API reference docs. You can now find detailed information on all of Jest's Globals, matchers, and every flag supported by the jest CLI.

2016 in Jest

December 15, 2016

Christoph Nakazawa

2016 was a big year for JavaScript testing with Jest. In the first six months of the year we rewrote Jest and built a solid foundation to significantly improve performance and the developer experience of testing JavaScript code. We flow-typed the entire codebase, built a ton of integration tests for Jest itself and adopted lerna to turn Jest from a framework into a Painless JavaScript Testing platform.

The newly created react-test-renderer finally enabled testing of react-native components. Through the jest-react-native preset (now merged directly into react-native) Jest now works out of the box for any React project and comes pre-configured in create-react-app and react-native projects. We integrated core pieces of Jest into react-native's packager and the completely new snapshot testing feature has since been used outside of Jest: It was integrated with React Storybook as “storyshots” and is being adopted by other test runners like ava.