Originally posted at michaelzanggl.com. Subscribe to my newsletter to never miss out on new content.

AdonisJs is great for test driven development. Let's build an API for a simple version of reddit using TDD. It will consist of subforums, threads, comments and users. You can find the GitHub for it here: https://github.com/MZanggl/tdd-adonisjs/commit/b2582b286e4da0166f30a8d6a8eee7c3aeb1c8bb.

Without further ado, let's get the project set up!

Install CLI and framework

npm i -g @adonisjs/cli

In this course we want to focus only on the adonis part and not the frontend, so let's create the project using the "api only" flag.

adonis new forum --api-only
cd forum

Install testing library

Adonis comes with its own testing library, let's install it with

adonis install @adonisjs/vow

We have to add the vowProvider under "start/app.js" in the aceProviders array to register the adonis test commands.

const aceProviders = [
    '@adonisjs/vow/providers/VowProvider',
]

The installation of vow comes with an example test, run adonis test, npm test or simply npm t to run it.

To make sure things are working, run the project using adonis serve --dev and head to the url in your browser!

And that's all there is to it, in the next blog post we will create our first test!