Access Intern Command Line Arguments

By  on  

SitePen's excellent client side testing tool, Intern, comes with an excellent command line utility to run tests and customize how those tests are run.  The options provided are great but what if I want to make the command line more dynamic?  What if I want to add custom command line arguments, available to tests, to pass along important information like sensitive credentials (which you don't want hard-coded in config files) or you simply want to allow overwriting of values within the static config file?  It's actually quite easy:

define(['intern'], function(intern) {
	
	if(intern.args.someCustomArg != undefined) {

		/* use the custom command line arg */

	}
});

The intern module provides you the provided arguments via the args property.  From there you can pick off the argument values as you wish.  So what do I pass in via the command line?

  • Login credentials for the test to use
  • The domain I want to test (local dev, staging, production)
  • Select browsers I want to test (i.e. I don't want to run all of them cited in the config)

What you could add is specific to your app, but be glad it's so easy to do!

Recent Features

  • By
    Send Text Messages with PHP

    Kids these days, I tell ya.  All they care about is the technology.  The video games.  The bottled water.  Oh, and the texting, always the texting.  Back in my day, all we had was...OK, I had all of these things too.  But I still don't get...

  • By
    7 Essential JavaScript Functions

    I remember the early days of JavaScript where you needed a simple function for just about everything because the browser vendors implemented features differently, and not just edge features, basic features, like addEventListener and attachEvent.  Times have changed but there are still a few functions each developer should...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools Clipboard Plugin

    The ability to place content into a user's clipboard can be extremely convenient for the user. Instead of clicking and dragging down what could be a lengthy document, the user can copy the contents of a specific area by a single click of a mouse.

  • By
    Vertically Centering with Flexbox

    Vertically centering sibling child contents is a task we've long needed on the web but has always seemed way more difficult than it should be.  We initially used tables to accomplish the task, then moved on to CSS and JavaScript tricks because table layout was horribly...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!