Preprocessors

Preprocessors in Karma allow you to do some work with your files before they get served to the browser. These are configured in the preprocessors block of the configuration file:

preprocessors: {
  '**/*.coffee': ['coffee'],
  '**/*.tea': ['coffee'],
  '**/*.html': ['html2js']
},

Note the multiple expressions referencing the "coffee" preprocessor, as a preprocessor can be listed more than once, as another way to specify multiple file path expressions.

Available Preprocessors #

These preprocessors/plugins are shipped with Karma by default:

• coffee
• html2js
  • Note any .html files listed in the files section must be referenced at run time as window.__html__['template.html']. Learn more.
  • If this preprocessor is disabled, included .html files will need base/ added to beginning of their path reference. See discussion in issue 788.

Additional preprocessors can be loaded through plugins, such as:

• coverage
• ng-html2js
• ember

As mentioned above above, only the coffee and html2j preprocessors come bundled with Karma. Therefore, to use additional preprocessors, simply install the required NPM library first and the installed preprocessor can be used regularly.

Here's an example of how to add the coverage preprocessor to your testing suite:

# Install it first with NPM
$ npm install karma-coverage --save-dev

And then inside your configuration file...

module.exports = function(config) {
  config.set({
    preprocessors: {
      '**/*.js': ['coverage']
    }
  });
};

Of course, you can write custom plugins too!

Configured Preprocessors #

Some of the preprocessors can be also configured:

coffeePreprocessor: {
  options: {
    bare: false
  }
}

Or define a configured preprocessor:

customPreprocessors: {
  bare_coffee: {
    base: 'coffee',
    options: {bare: true}
  }
}

Minimatching #

The keys of the preprocessors config object are used to filter the files specified in the files configuration.

• First the file paths are expanded to an absolute path, based on the basePath configuration and the directory of the configuration file. See files for more information on that.
• Then the newly expanded path is matched using minimatch against the specified key.

So for example the path /my/absolute/path/to/test/unit/file.coffee matched against the key **/*.coffee would return true, but matched against just *.coffee it would return false and the preprocessor would not be executed on the CoffeeScript files.