Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications

Separating development and testing servers

Good job. Using a test database is certainly a step forward, but our testing workflow is still disjointed. At the moment, to run our tests, we need to stop our development API server, set the environment variables, and then restart it. Similarly, once the tests are finished, we need to stop and restart it again with the development environment.

Ideally, we should run two separate instances of the API server—one for development, one for testing—each binding to its own port. This way, there's no need to stop and restart our server just to run tests.

To achieve this, simply override the SERVER_PORT environment variable for our test environment by adding the following line to envs/test.env and envs/test.env.example ...