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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:

There are multiple expressions referencing the "coffee" preprocessor in this example, as a preprocessor can be listed more than once as another way to specify multiple file path expressions.

Note:

Most of the preprocessors need to be loaded as plugins.

Available Preprocessors #

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

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

And then inside your configuration file...

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

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.