Logs are an essential part of test automation – they leave a trace of execution that is indispensable when backtracking through failures. Missing logs can make it much, much harder to figure out problems in the code. Recently, I hit this problem while writing unit tests for an Angular project: neither the console nor Google Chrome’s debugger showed any helpful error messages! Thankfully, there was a pretty easy solution. This article will explain the problem and the solution.

Update (January 18, 2018):

After further research, it appears that this problem was fixed in the @angular/cli 1.3.x release. I updated to 1.3.2, removed the “–sourcemaps=false” option, and verified that the error messages are printed. Furthermore, the source mapping is correct – the errors map to the correct line and column in the sources files!

If you are stuck using a version prior to 1.3.x, then use the workaround detailed below. Otherwise, upgrade the package and avoid the problem altogether!

TL;DR

Disable source maps when running Angular tests:

$ ng test --sourcemaps=false

Angular Project Setup

This article presumes the standard Angular 4 project setup, as automatically generated by the “ng new” command. Jasmine unit tests are written in “*.spec.ts” files and run with Karma using Google Chrome as the browser.

The Problem

The Angular testing utilities provide great support for isolating and exercising parts of Angular code for unit testing. However, programmers need to use them properly, or else they won’t work. When I tried writing some unit tests for ngrx, I quickly hit dependency problems. However, it took me hours to figure it out because the console output was not helpful – all it would print was “ERROR”:

As a newbie, I had no idea what went wrong. I tried debugging with Chrome, but the error message I got there was cryptic and not much more helpful:

The Solution

After googling for a while, I discovered that there is a bug with source maps in the Angular CLI (Issue #7296). The workaround is to add the “–sourcemaps=false” option to the “ng test” command. If the package.json file contains a “test” script that calls “ng test”, the option may be added there. Now, the console prints error messages:

Errors also appear on the Karma page in the browser:

One side effect of this workaround, however, is that the line and column numbers don’t correctly line up to the TypeScript files. I presume that they map to the compiled JavaScript files instead. Nevertheless, error messages with wrong line numbers are better than no error messages at all. There may be a way to fix the source mapping, but that’s a problem for another day. Hopefully, the Angular team will fix this “feature” for us.

Now, time to go fix those test errors!