Testing

Before opening a pull request, make sure pnpm test and pnpm lint pass. This page explains how to run each kind of test on its own.

Frontend and SDK

These run without a database or other services.

pnpm --filter frontend test
pnpm --filter cherrypick-js test

Backend

There are three kinds of backend tests.

Kind	Location
Unit tests	packages/backend/test/unit
Single-server E2E tests	packages/backend/test/e2e
Multi-server (federation) E2E tests	packages/backend/test-federation

Unit tests and single-server E2E tests

Copy the test configuration file.

cp .github/cherrypick/test.yml .config/

Start PostgreSQL and Redis for testing.

docker compose -f packages/backend/test/compose.yml up

Alternatively, prepare an empty database whose data can be erased and edit .config/test.yml.

Run the tests.

pnpm --filter backend test      # unit tests
pnpm --filter backend test:e2e  # single-server E2E tests

To run a specific test, pass a path relative to packages/backend.

pnpm --filter backend test test/unit/activitypub.ts
pnpm --filter backend test:e2e test/e2e/nodeinfo.ts

You can also filter by test name with -t. To re-run on file changes, use pnpm --filter backend vitest-watch.

Multi-server (federation) E2E tests

See packages/backend/test-federation/README.md.

Frontend E2E tests

These use Playwright to start a real server and drive it from a browser. Like the backend tests, they need the test database and Redis (.config/test.yml).

pnpm build
pnpm --filter frontend exec playwright install chromium
pnpm start-server-and-test start:test http://localhost:61812 "pnpm --filter frontend test:e2e"

start:test starts the server with the settings in .config/test.yml. If a server is already running, you can point to it with the environment variable CHERRYPICK_URL and run only pnpm --filter frontend test:e2e.

CI

Tests run automatically on GitHub Actions. The configuration is in .github/workflows.