chai-http: Cannot read property 'headers' of undefined at Assertion.<anonymous>

Question

I get this error when I'm running my unit tests on gitlab pipeline, but it work fine on my local environement:

TypeError: Cannot read property 'headers' of undefined
    at Assertion.<anonymous> (node_modules/chai-http/lib/http.js:175:19)
    at Assertion.propertyGetter (node_modules/chai/lib/chai/utils/addProperty.js:62:29)
    at Object.get (<anonymous>)
    at Object.proxyGetter [as get] (node_modules/chai/lib/chai/utils/proxify.js:98:22)
    at Assertion.<anonymous> (node_modules/chai-http/lib/http.js:224:40)
    at Assertion.propertyGetter (node_modules/chai/lib/chai/utils/addProperty.js:62:29)
    at Object.get (<anonymous>)
    at Object.proxyGetter [as get] (node_modules/chai/lib/chai/utils/proxify.js:98:22)
    at /app/tests/Auth/AuthGetRegister.js:10:21
    at Test.Request.callback (node_modules/superagent/lib/node/index.js:728:3)
    at ClientRequest.<anonymous> (node_modules/superagent/lib/node/index.js:647:10)
    at Socket.socketErrorListener (_http_client.js:469:9)
    at emitErrorNT (internal/streams/destroy.js:106:8)
    at emitErrorCloseNT (internal/streams/destroy.js:74:3)
    at processTicksAndRejections (internal/process/task_queues.js:80:21)

Here is my unit tests files architecture:

tests/
├── Auth/
│   ├── AuthGetRegister.js
├── common.js
└── top.js

The app is also working on docker environment.

Unit tests are run by the following command:

./node_modules/.bin/mocha tests --reporter mocha-junit-reporter --reporter-options mochaFile=./test_results/test-results.xml --unhandled-rejections=strict

common.js:

let chai = require("chai");
let chaiHttp = require('chai-http');
let jwt = require('jsonwebtoken');
let fs = require('fs');

let privateKey = fs.readFileSync( __dirname + '/../RSA/jwtRS256.key');
let options = {
    server: "http://localhost:3000/api",
    jwt: jwt.sign({ userId: "fa76aff7-83e7-4ec2-b3e7-79d1629577b0" }, privateKey, { expiresIn: '3m',  algorithm: 'RS256' })
};

chai.use(chaiHttp);

exports.options = options;
exports.chai = chai;
exports.assert = chai.assert;
exports.expect = chai.expect;

top.js:

var common = require("./common");

/*
**  Auth
*/

describe("GET /api/auth/register", function () {
    require('./Auth/AuthGetRegister');
});

AuthGetRegister.js:

let common = require("../common");
let options = common.options;
let chai = common.chai;
let expect = common.expect;

it('it should return status 200 with a list of pathologies', (done) => {
    chai.request(options.server)
        .get('/auth/register')
        .end((err, res) => {
            expect(res).to.be.json;
            expect(res).to.have.status(200);
            done();
        });
});

I put AuthGetRegister as exemple, but get the same error for all my unit tests.

I already tried the workarounds proposed here, but it dosent work.

Answer 1

It was an issue with my gitlab configuration. The unit tests were run before the server was fully run.

I add a wait-for-it script to wait for the server to be run, then run the unit tests.