How to best structure your project node redis for testing? Use testcontainers or mock? Which mock libraries do you recommend?

[slidenerd]

• Apologize for multiple questions here
• Every example you see in the documentation goes like

import redis from 'redis';

const client = redis.createClient(...)
client.on('error', logger.error)
export { client }

• This opens a connection immediately to an actual redis database
• When you import this file literally anywhere, it makes testing as a whole a nightmare

Questions

• How do you structure this keeping testing in mind?
• Testcontainers aka integration test this or go with mocks?
• Which mocking libraries do you recommend?

[nkaradzhov]

@slidenerd

connection to server is made only when connect() is called.

I think, if you are testing application code, both approaches ( mocking and using fake/ephemeral redis ) work. They have slightly different purposes i would say. Usually you want to mock in a lower level unit-test for speed. And you can use testcontainers or any other non-prod redis instance to connect to for integration/end-to-end tests.