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
    CSS vs. JS Animation: Which is Faster?

    How is it possible that JavaScript-based animation has secretly always been as fast — or faster — than CSS transitions? And, how is it possible that Adobe and Google consistently release media-rich mobile sites that rival the performance of native apps? This article serves as a point-by-point...

  • By
    CSS Filters

    CSS filter support recently landed within WebKit nightlies. CSS filters provide a method for modifying the rendering of a basic DOM element, image, or video. CSS filters allow for blurring, warping, and modifying the color intensity of elements. Let's have...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    WebKit-Specific Style:  -webkit-appearance

    I was recently scoping out the horrid source code of the Google homepage when I noticed the "Google Search" and "I'm Feeling Lucky" buttons had a style definition I hadn't seen before:  -webkit-appearance.  The value assigned to the style was "push-button."  They are buttons so that...

  • By
    Create Custom Events in MooTools 1.2

    Javascript has a number of native events like "mouseover," "mouseout", "click", and so on. What if you want to create your own events though? Creating events using MooTools is as easy as it gets. The MooTools JavaScript What's great about creating custom events in MooTools is...

Discussion

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