Case study: real world dependency stubbing

Sinon is a simple tool that only tries to do a few things and do them well: creating and injecting test doubles (spies, fakes, stubs) into objects. Unfortunately, in today's world of build pipelines, complex tooling, transpilers and different module systems, doing the simple thing quickly becomes difficult.

This article is a detailed step-by-step guide on how one can approach the typical issues that arise and various approaches for debugging and solving them. The real-world case chosen is using Sinon along with SWC, running tests written in TypeScript in the Mocha test runner and wanting to replace dependencies in this system under test. The essence is that there are always many approaches for achieving what you want. Some require tooling, some can get away with almost no tooling, some are general in nature (not specific to SWC for instance) and some are a blend. This means you can usually make some of these approaches work for other combinations of tooling as well, once you understand what is going on. Draw inspiration from the approach and figure out what works for you!

On TypeScript

The Sinon project does not explicitly list TypeScript as a supported target environment. That does not mean Sinon will not run, just that there are so many complications that we cannot come up with guides on figuring out the details for you on every system.

TypeScript is a super-set of JavaScript and can be transpiled in a wide variety of ways into JavaScript, both by targeting different runtimes (ES5, ES2015, ES2023, etc) and module systems (CommonJS, ESM, AMD, ...). Some transpilers are closer to what the standard TypeScript compiler produces, some are laxer in various ways and additionally they have all kinds of options to tweak the result. This is indeed complex, so before you dig yourself down in this matter, it is essential that you try to figure out what the resulting code actually looks like.

As you will see in this guide, adding a few sprinkles of console.log with the output of Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor(object, propname) is usually sufficient to understand what is going on!

All code and working setups described in this guide are on GitHub and links to the correct branch can be found in each section.

Scenario

Tech

• Mocha: drives the tests
• SWC: very fast Rust-based transpiler able to target different module systems (CJS, ESM, ...) and target runtimes (ES5, ES2020, ...)
• TypeScript: Type-safe JavaScript superset
• Sinon: library for creating and injecting test doubles (stubs, mocks, spies and fakes)
• Module system: CommonJS

Desired outcome

Being able to replace exports on the dependency ./other with a Sinon created test double in main.ts when running tests (see code below).

Problem

Running tests with ts-node works fine, but changing the setup to using SWC instead results in the tests failing with the following output from Mocha:

1) main
       should mock:
     TypeError: Descriptor for property toBeMocked is non-configurable and non-writable

Original code

main.ts

import { toBeMocked } from "./other";

export function main() {
  const out = toBeMocked();
  console.log(out);
}

other.ts

export function toBeMocked() {
  return "I am the original function";
}

main.spec.ts

import sinon from "sinon";
import "./init";
import * as Other from "./other";
import { main } from "./main";
import { expect } from "chai";

const sandbox = sinon.createSandbox();

describe("main", () => {
  let mocked;
  it("should mock", () => {
    mocked = sandbox.stub(Other, "toBeMocked").returns("mocked");
    main();
    expect(mocked.called).to.be.true;
  });
});

Additionally, both the .swcrc file used by SWC and the tsconfig.json file used by ts-node is configured to produce modules of the CommonJS form, not ES Modules.

Brief Analysis

The error message indicates the resulting output of transpilation is different from that of ts-node, as this is Sinon telling us that it is unable to do anything with the property of an object, when the property descriptor is essentially immutable.

Let us sprinkle some debugging statements to figure out what the differences between the two tools are. First we will add some debugging output to the beginning of the test:

console.log("Other", Other);
console.log(
  "Other property descriptors",
  Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptors(Other),
);

Output of a SWC configured run

Other { toBeMocked: [Getter] }
Other property descriptors {
  __esModule: {
    value: true,
    writable: false,
    enumerable: false,
    configurable: false
  },
  toBeMocked: {
    get: [Function: get],
    set: undefined,
    enumerable: true,
    configurable: false
  }
}
    1) should mock

Output of a ts-node configured run

Other { toBeMocked: [Function: toBeMocked] }
Other property descriptors {
  __esModule: {
    value: true,
    writable: false,
    enumerable: false,
    configurable: false
  },
  toBeMocked: {
    value: [Function: toBeMocked],
    writable: true,
    enumerable: true,
    configurable: true
  }
}
mocked
    ✔ should mock

The important difference is that the property toBeMocked is a simple writable value in the case of ts-node and a non-configurable getter in the case of SWC. It being a getter is not a problem for Sinon, as we have a multitude of options for replacing those, but if configurable is set to false Sinon cannot really do anything about it.

Conclusion of analysis

SWC transforms imports on the form import * as Other from './other' into objects where the individual exports are exposed through immutable accessors (getters).

We can address this issue in mainly 3 ways:

1. reconfigure SWC to produce different output when running tests, either making writable values or configurable getters
2. use pure dependency injection, opening up ./other.ts to be changed from the inside
3. address how modules are loaded, injecting an additional require hook

Solutions

Mutating the output from the transpiler

If we can just flip the configurable flag to true during transpilation, Sinon could be instructed to replace the getter. It turns out, there is a SWC plugin that does just that: swc_mut_cjs_exports. By installing that and adding the following under the jsc key in .swcrc, you now get a configurable property descriptor.

"experimental": {
  "plugins": [[ "swc_mut_cjs_exports", {} ]]
},

A getter is different from a value, so you need to change your test code slightly to replace the getter:

const stub = sandbox.fake.returns("mocked");
sandbox.replaceGetter(Other, "toBeMocked", () => stub);

Use pure dependency injection

Version 1: full manual mode

This technique works regardless of language, module systems, bundlers and tool chains, but requires slight modifications of the system under test to allow modifying it. Sinon does not help in resetting state automatically in this scenario.

other.ts

function _toBeMocked() {
  return "I am the original function";
}

export let toBeMocked = _toBeMocked;

export function _setToBeMocked(mockImplementation) {
  toBeMocked = mockImplementation;
}

main.spec.ts

describe("main", () => {
  let mocked;
  let original = Other.toBeMocked;

  after(() => Other._setToBeMocked(original));

  it("should mock", () => {
    mocked = sandbox.stub().returns("mocked");
    Other._setToBeMocked(mocked);
    main();
    expect(mocked.called).to.be.true;
  });
});

Version 2: using Sinon's auto-cleanup

This is a slight variation of the fully manual dependency injection version, but with a twist to make it nicer. Sinon 16.1 gained the ability to assign and restore values that were defined using accessors. That means, that if you expose an object with setters and getters for props you would like to replace, you can get Sinon to clean up after you.

other.ts

function _toBeMocked() {
  return "I am the original function";
}

export let toBeMocked = _toBeMocked;

export const myMocks = {
  set toBeMocked(mockImplementation) {
    toBeMocked = mockImplementation;
  },
  get toBeMocked() {
    return _toBeMocked;
  },
};

main.spec.ts

describe("main", () => {
  after(() => sandbox.restore());

  it("should mock", () => {
    mocked = sandbox.fake.returns("mocked");
    sandbox.replace.usingAccessor(Other.myMocks, 'toBeMocked', mocked);
    main();
    expect(mocked.called).to.be.true;
  });
});

Hooking into Node's module loading

This is what the article on targeting the link seams is about. The only difference here is using Quibble instead of Proxyquire. Quibble is slightly terser and also supports being used as an ESM loader, making it a bit more modern and useful. The end result looks like this:

describe("main module", () => {
  let mocked, main;

  before(() => {
    mocked = sandbox.stub().returns("mocked");
    quibble("./other", { toBeMocked: mocked });
    ({ main } = require("./main"));
  });

  it("should mock", () => {
    main();
    expect(mocked.called).to.be.true;
  });
});

Final remarks

As can be seen, there are lots of different paths to walk in order to achieve the same basic goal. Find the one that works for your case.