How to elegantly skip express-jwt middleware when running tests?

Question

This is a small middleware that i created to skip authentication during tests on my nodejs app:

authentication(auth) {
    if (process.env.NODE_ENV !== 'test') {
        return jwt({
            secret: new Buffer(auth.secret, 'base64'),
            audience: auth.clientId
        });
    } else {
        return (req, res, next) => { next(); };
    }
}

I am not happy with the way it looks. Is there a more elegant way of accomplishing this ?

Answer 1

I think you are right to not be happy with the way that looks. I think what you really want to be able to do is mock out your authentication from the test code instead of inside your actual application code. One way to do this is via proxyquire.

Then a very simple test could look something like this if app.js requires authentication via var authentication = require('./lib/authentication')

var proxyquire =  require('proxyquire');
var app = proxyquire('./app.js', { 
  './lib/authentication': function() {
    // your "test" implementation of authentication goes here
    // this function replaces anywhere ./app.js requires authentication
  }
});

it('does stuff', function() { ... });