Plugins

Karma can be easily extended through plugins. In fact, all the existing preprocessors, reporters, browser launchers and frameworks are plugins.

You can install existing plugins from NPM or you can write your own plugins for Karma.

Installing Plugins #

The recommended way to install plugins is to add them as project dependencies in your package.json:

{
  "devDependencies": {
    "karma": "~0.10",
    "karma-mocha": "~0.0.1",
    "karma-growl-reporter": "~0.0.1",
    "karma-firefox-launcher": "~0.0.1"
  }
}

Therefore, a simple way to install a plugin is:

npm install karma-<plugin name> --save-dev

Loading Plugins #

By default, Karma loads plugins from all sibling NPM packages which have a name starting with karma-*.

You can also override this behavior and explicitly list plugins you want to load via the plugins configuration setting:

config.set({
  plugins: [
    // Load a plugin you installed from NPM.
    require('karma-jasmine'),

    // Load a plugin from the file in your project.
    require('./my-custom-plugin'),
  
    // Define a plugin inline.
    { 'framework:xyz': ['factory', factoryFn] },

    // Specify a module name or path which Karma will require() and load its 
    // default export as a plugin.
    'karma-chrome-launcher',
    './my-fancy-plugin'
  ]
})

Activating Plugins #

Adding a plugin to the plugins array only makes Karma aware of the plugin, but it does not activate it. Depending on the plugin type you'll need to add a plugin name into frameworks, reporters, preprocessors, middleware or browsers configuration key to activate it. For the detailed information refer to the corresponding plugin documentation or check out Developing plugins guide for more in-depth explanation of how plugins work.