Clear out pact directory during setup?

[TimothyJones]

Usually I end up wrapping the test script with something that clears out the pacts folder - it would be great if we could do this automatically.

[YOU54F]

that sounds like a good idea, we could use something like rimraf. (https://github.com/isaacs/rimraf)

do you store each pact in a pacts folder, as a root file, or in subfolders? i store consumer/provider pairs in pacts folder, non nested

If we delete the entire folder, we would need to consider the use of multiple test scripts running in parallel, in a single repo, as we couldn't delete the whole folder, as we may lose pacts generated by other tests.

[YOU54F]

Thinking about this, as we know the users pact directory, we could add a flag to say clearPactDirBeforeTest?

[TimothyJones]

You have to do this at test setup time, which is a different time to the time all the current jest-pact code runs (because you can have pactWith in multiple spec files).

You can do it with a global setup module exported by jest-pact - see here https://jestjs.io/docs/configuration#globalsetup-string . We could do jest-pact/clearPactFolder or similar.

However, to implement it, you need to know what the test directory is. The setup is currently passed to pactWith, which would not be readable during the setup time.

The plan I was loosely thinking was to implement pactrc config, which would obviate the need for the "sensible defaults" used in jest-pact (because we could implement / move that implementation there instead).

[YOU54F]

Hmmm, all very good points. Been a while since I've dived into Jest's innard, but there were some interesting things that came out of the pact-watch discussion that might allow us more configurability

I love the idea of a pact config file, and inspired by some of the experiences of CLI tools, so have been experimenting with some projects to scaffold a repo or setup pact in a project.

I think there is so much pain felt from things like env vars (different shells/os's/Makefiles), that reading sensible defaults from a config file, would be a nice feature.

Wonder if we might want a generic json one, and then language specific ones, as I'm sure each language has its own convention for setup files?

[TimothyJones]

Project-wide, we might want a general pact config. I was thinking we'd implement something that works for pact-js, and then see if other projects wanted to pick it up (although I was also thinking that anything language specific would go in its own key in the JSON).

[TimothyJones]

I don't know why I'm saying we. I'm not planning to do any of this work now that I'm no longer a maintainer. Sorry.

[YOU54F]

It's okay @TimothyJones I know it is the collective we ❤️

Thanks for all your many contributions, and still caring about beautiful developer experiences.

[radiovisual]

What about not clearing the pact directory on setup, but instead write the pact to temporary files, only updating the official pact files when/if the test run is successful? Seems pretty destructive to nuke the pact directory even if the tests fail...or am I missing something?

[mefellows]

That just makes the test suite more complicated, because you need to tell pact the merge / replace the file when it's done. Technically the tests can be run in parallel which is why it's necessary to remove it in advance, to ensure no stale/outdated interactions remain there.

There's nothing important about the files so nuking them in advance shouldn't be a problem.

It's probably only a problem if you publish from your dev machine (which is not recommended) because you're unlikely to have stale interactions on CI

[radiovisual]

Yes, true. It would complicate things with little benefit...

[TimothyJones]

It's probably only a problem if you publish from your dev machine (which is not recommended)

It's also a problem if you commit your pact files (which is also not recommended, although I don't recall it being explicit in the documentation). I've definitely seen installs where this is the case.