jsdom is, as said in our tagline, “A JavaScript implementation of the DOM and HTML standards.” Anything that helps us be better at that is welcome.
We use the Yarn package manager to manage dependencies and run the scripts defined in package.json. It is similar to npm, but contains fewer bugs for our purposes. If you make changes which add or remove dependencies, make sure you commit the yarn.lock file which it generates.
You can probably get away with using npm for most contributions, as long as you are not adding or removing dependencies. You'll have to mentally translate the Yarn commands we give into npm ones, however.
jsdom is a blend of old and new code. Some of its older and less-touched corners may look different from newer work. Here we'll describe the modern setup, but you might encounter parts of the codebase that don't fit this model, or that seem unnecessarily baroque (like the directory structure in lib/).
In general, a web platform class (like Window, or Node, or Location, or CSSStyleSheet) is specified using a language called Web IDL. Web IDL abstracts away a lot of the boilerplate involved in creating such classes, like type conversions, argument validation, and attribute/property reflection.
As such, most web platform classes present in jsdom are implemented in two parts:
-
An IDL file, such as
Attr.webidl, drawn more or less straight from the spec -
An implementation file, such as
Attr-impl.js, containing the relevant implementation logic
Our build step (yarn prepare) then generates a public API file (e.g. Attr.js) which takes care of all the Web IDL-derived boilerplate, delegating to the implementation file for the important stuff. We then wire it together with a line in lib/jsdom/living/index.js that exposes the generated class on all jsdom windows.
When contributing, the first question you should ask is:
Can I exhibit how the browsers differ from what jsdom is doing?
If you can, then you've almost certainly found a bug in or missing feature of jsdom, and we'd love to have your contribution. In that case, move on to:
What spec covers this potential contribution?
Almost all of our relevant functionality is covered in either the DOM Living Standard or the HTML Living Standard. There are various obsolete W3C specs ("DOM Level 2" etc.) that were never really implemented in browsers, and there is also the "DOM Level 4" W3C fork of the WHATWG DOM Living Standard. But we try to stick to the two main WHATWG specs for jsdom these days.
Other specs might pop up from time to time, especially in regard to CSS stuff. In general Mozilla's Servo project provides good guidance on relevant places to look. platform.html5.org is also pretty comprehensive.
First you'll want to run yarn to install all dependencies. Then, configure your system to run the web platform tests as described in their README. If you can't get that set up correctly, the test runner will make a best-faith effort to run the tests hosted on http://w3c-test.org/, but this is pretty slow and fragile.
To run all the tests: yarn test
In the following sections, we'll give commands for running a subset of the tests. If you do that, instead of running the whole suite with yarn test, then please run this command first:
Before running test subsets: yarn pretest
All tests for web platform features (as opposed to features of jsdom itself, such as the JSDOM() constructor) should be in web-platform-tests format. We have some infrastructure for running these directly against jsdom documents. So ideally, when contributing a bugfix or new feature, you can browse the web-platform-tests repository and find the test covering your work, and then just enable it in the to-run.yaml file. These tests are HTML files which use a special library called testharness.js to report their results.
However, the web-platform-tests project is not fully comprehensive. If you need to write your own test for a web platform feature, place it in our to-upstream directory. (It's so named because, over time, we hope to upstream these tests back to the web-platform-tests repository, so all browsers can benefit from them.) Note that you may need to create new directory structure, paralleling that of the main web-platform-tests repository.
To run all web-platform-tests: yarn test-wpt
To run the to-upstream web-platform-tests: yarn test-tuwpt
To run specific web-platform-tests already enabled via to-run.yaml: yarn test-wpt --fgrep dom/events
To run specific to-upstream web-platform-tests: yarn test-tuwpt --fgrep domparsing
Also, to update web platform tests to their latest revision from the source repository: yarn update-wpt. (This can take a long time, like 10 minutes.)
If you are testing something that can only be accomplished through the jsdom API, and not inside a normal web browser, you'll want to write a different kind of test. Such tests are written using Mocha and Chai.
To write such a test that, simply add a file in test/api/, following the surrounding conventions. Then, add it to the manifest at test/index.js.
To run all API tests: yarn test-api
To run a specific API test: yarn test-mocha test/api/from-file.js
Although ideally you should not need to worry about this, there are some tests that are for legacy reasons not in the right format; they use Mocha, but really should be web platform tests. We're keeping them around for coverage until we can convert them. If you run yarn test, you will get the full test suite, including such old tests.
jsdom has experimental support to run in directly in a browser, in both the main document and in a web worker! So we try run as many tests as possible in browsers too. Currently we only test in Chrome, since it has the same JavaScript features as the Node.js environment we usually develop in. So you'll need Chrome installed on your machine.
The mocha test cases are executed in Chrome using karma. Currently, web platform tests are not executed in the browser yet.
To run all browser tests: yarn test-browser
To run the karma tests in an iframe: yarn test-browser-iframe
To run the karma tests in a web worker: yarn test-browser-worker
This project cares about performance. There are a number of benchmarks that you can run. If you suspect your contribution has an impact on the performance of existing functionality, make sure you run the benchmarks before and after your change so that you can compare.
You can also run the benchmarks using the native DOM implementation of Chrome. A comparison with jsdom will automatically be made for you. If your new feature is much slower than the alternative DOM implementation, there might be an unexpected bottleneck somewhere in your change.
To run benchmarks in Node.js: yarn benchmark
To run benchmarks in the browser: yarn benchmark-browser, then open benchmark/browser-runner.html in Chrome (or Chromium) and use the developer console to execute the run() function.
If you've read this far, you should know everything there is to know about contributing to jsdom. We have an active and full issue tracker that we'd love you to help with. Go find something broken or missing, and fix it!