• Product
  • Pricing
  • Docs
  • Using PostHog
  • Community
  • Company
  • Login
  • Docs

  • Overview
    • Quickstart with PostHog Cloud
    • Overview
      • AWS
      • Azure
      • DigitalOcean
      • Google Cloud Platform
      • Hobby
      • EU Hosting Companies
      • Other platforms
      • Instance settings
      • Environment variables
      • Securing PostHog
      • Monitoring with Grafana
      • Running behind a proxy
      • Configuring email
      • Helm chart configuration
      • Deploying ClickHouse using Altinity.Cloud
      • Configuring Slack
      • Overview
        • Overview
        • Upgrade notes
        • Overview
        • 0001-events-sample-by
        • 0002_events_sample_by
        • 0003_fill_person_distinct_id2
        • ClickHouse
          • Backup
          • Debug hanging / freezing process
          • Horizontal scaling (Sharding & replication)
          • Kafka Engine
          • Resize disk
          • Restore
          • Vertical scaling
        • Kafka
          • Resize disk
          • Log retention
        • PostgreSQL
          • Resize disk
          • Troubleshooting long-running migrations
        • Plugin server
        • MinIO
        • Redis
        • Zookeeper
      • Disaster recovery
    • Troubleshooting and FAQs
    • Support for self-hosting (open-source and enterprise)
    • Managing hosting costs
    • Overview
    • Ingest live data
    • Ingest historical data
    • Identify users
    • User properties
    • Deploying a reverse proxy
    • Library comparison
    • Badge
    • Browser Extensions
      • Snippet installation
      • Android
      • iOS
      • JavaScript
      • Flutter
      • React Native
      • Node.js
      • Go
      • Python
      • Rust
      • Java
      • PHP
      • Ruby
      • Elixir
      • Docusaurus v2
      • Gatsby
      • Google Tag Manager
      • Next.js
      • Nuxt.js
      • Retool
      • RudderStack
      • Segment
      • Sentry
      • Slack
      • Shopify
      • WordPress
      • Message formatting
      • Microsoft Teams
      • Slack
      • Discord
    • To another self-hosted instance
    • To PostHog from Amplitude
    • To PostHog Cloud EU
    • Between Cloud and self-hosted
    • Overview
    • Tutorial
    • Troubleshooting
    • Developer reference
    • Using the PostHog API
    • Jobs
    • Testing
    • TypeScript types
    • Overview
    • POST-only public endpoints
    • Actions
    • Annotations
    • Cohorts
    • Dashboards
    • Event definitions
    • Events
    • Experiments
    • Feature flags
    • Funnels
    • Groups
    • Groups types
    • Insights
    • Invites
    • Members
    • Persons
    • Plugin configs
    • Plugins
    • Projects
    • Property definitions
    • Session recordings
    • Trends
    • Users
    • Data model
    • Overview
    • Data model
    • Ingestion pipeline
    • ClickHouse
    • Querying data
    • Overview
    • GDPR guidance
    • HIPAA guidance
    • CCPA guidance
    • Data egress & compliance
    • Data deletion
    • Overview
    • Code of conduct
    • Recognizing contributions
  • Using PostHog

  • Table of contents
      • Dashboards
      • Funnels
      • Group Analytics
      • Insights
      • Lifecycle
      • Path analysis
      • Retention
      • Stickiness
      • Trends
      • Heatmaps
      • Session Recording
      • Correlation Analysis
      • Experimentation
      • Feature Flags
      • Actions
      • Annotations
      • Cohorts
      • Data Management
      • Events
      • Persons
      • Sessions
      • UTM segmentation
      • Team collaboration
      • Organizations & projects
      • Settings
      • SSO & SAML
      • Toolbar
      • Notifications & alerts
    • Overview
      • Amazon Kinesis Import
      • BitBucket Release Tracker
      • Event Replicator
      • GitHub Release Tracker
      • GitHub Star Sync
      • GitLab Release Tracker
      • Heartbeat
      • Ingestion Alert
      • Email Scoring
      • n8n Connector
      • Orbit Connector
      • Redshift Import
      • Segment Connector
      • Shopify Connector
      • Twitter Followers Tracker
      • Zendesk Connector
      • Airbyte Exporter
      • Amazon S3 Export
      • BigQuery Export
      • Customer.io Connector
      • Databricks Export
      • Engage Connector
      • GCP Pub/Sub Connector
      • Google Cloud Storage Export
      • Hubspot Connector
      • Intercom Connector
      • Migrator 3000
      • PagerDuty Connector
      • PostgreSQL Export
      • Redshift Export
      • RudderStack Export
      • Salesforce Connector
      • Sendgrid Connector
      • Sentry Connector
      • Snowflake Export
      • Twilio Connector
      • Variance Connector
      • Zapier Connector
      • Downsampler
      • Event Sequence Timer
      • First Time Event Tracker
      • Property Filter
      • Property Flattener
      • Schema Enforcer
      • Taxonomy Standardizer
      • Unduplicator
      • Automatic Cohort Creator
      • Currency Normalizer
      • GeoIP Enricher
      • Timestamp Parser
      • URL Normalizer
      • User Agent Populator
  • Tutorials
    • All tutorials
    • Actions
    • Apps
    • Cohorts
    • Dashboards
    • Feature flags
    • Funnels
    • Heatmaps
    • Path analysis
    • Retention
    • Session recording
    • Trends
  • Support
  • Glossary
  • Docs

  • Overview
    • Quickstart with PostHog Cloud
    • Overview
      • AWS
      • Azure
      • DigitalOcean
      • Google Cloud Platform
      • Hobby
      • EU Hosting Companies
      • Other platforms
      • Instance settings
      • Environment variables
      • Securing PostHog
      • Monitoring with Grafana
      • Running behind a proxy
      • Configuring email
      • Helm chart configuration
      • Deploying ClickHouse using Altinity.Cloud
      • Configuring Slack
      • Overview
        • Overview
        • Upgrade notes
        • Overview
        • 0001-events-sample-by
        • 0002_events_sample_by
        • 0003_fill_person_distinct_id2
        • ClickHouse
          • Backup
          • Debug hanging / freezing process
          • Horizontal scaling (Sharding & replication)
          • Kafka Engine
          • Resize disk
          • Restore
          • Vertical scaling
        • Kafka
          • Resize disk
          • Log retention
        • PostgreSQL
          • Resize disk
          • Troubleshooting long-running migrations
        • Plugin server
        • MinIO
        • Redis
        • Zookeeper
      • Disaster recovery
    • Troubleshooting and FAQs
    • Support for self-hosting (open-source and enterprise)
    • Managing hosting costs
    • Overview
    • Ingest live data
    • Ingest historical data
    • Identify users
    • User properties
    • Deploying a reverse proxy
    • Library comparison
    • Badge
    • Browser Extensions
      • Snippet installation
      • Android
      • iOS
      • JavaScript
      • Flutter
      • React Native
      • Node.js
      • Go
      • Python
      • Rust
      • Java
      • PHP
      • Ruby
      • Elixir
      • Docusaurus v2
      • Gatsby
      • Google Tag Manager
      • Next.js
      • Nuxt.js
      • Retool
      • RudderStack
      • Segment
      • Sentry
      • Slack
      • Shopify
      • WordPress
      • Message formatting
      • Microsoft Teams
      • Slack
      • Discord
    • To another self-hosted instance
    • To PostHog from Amplitude
    • To PostHog Cloud EU
    • Between Cloud and self-hosted
    • Overview
    • Tutorial
    • Troubleshooting
    • Developer reference
    • Using the PostHog API
    • Jobs
    • Testing
    • TypeScript types
    • Overview
    • POST-only public endpoints
    • Actions
    • Annotations
    • Cohorts
    • Dashboards
    • Event definitions
    • Events
    • Experiments
    • Feature flags
    • Funnels
    • Groups
    • Groups types
    • Insights
    • Invites
    • Members
    • Persons
    • Plugin configs
    • Plugins
    • Projects
    • Property definitions
    • Session recordings
    • Trends
    • Users
    • Data model
    • Overview
    • Data model
    • Ingestion pipeline
    • ClickHouse
    • Querying data
    • Overview
    • GDPR guidance
    • HIPAA guidance
    • CCPA guidance
    • Data egress & compliance
    • Data deletion
    • Overview
    • Code of conduct
    • Recognizing contributions
  • Using PostHog

  • Table of contents
      • Dashboards
      • Funnels
      • Group Analytics
      • Insights
      • Lifecycle
      • Path analysis
      • Retention
      • Stickiness
      • Trends
      • Heatmaps
      • Session Recording
      • Correlation Analysis
      • Experimentation
      • Feature Flags
      • Actions
      • Annotations
      • Cohorts
      • Data Management
      • Events
      • Persons
      • Sessions
      • UTM segmentation
      • Team collaboration
      • Organizations & projects
      • Settings
      • SSO & SAML
      • Toolbar
      • Notifications & alerts
    • Overview
      • Amazon Kinesis Import
      • BitBucket Release Tracker
      • Event Replicator
      • GitHub Release Tracker
      • GitHub Star Sync
      • GitLab Release Tracker
      • Heartbeat
      • Ingestion Alert
      • Email Scoring
      • n8n Connector
      • Orbit Connector
      • Redshift Import
      • Segment Connector
      • Shopify Connector
      • Twitter Followers Tracker
      • Zendesk Connector
      • Airbyte Exporter
      • Amazon S3 Export
      • BigQuery Export
      • Customer.io Connector
      • Databricks Export
      • Engage Connector
      • GCP Pub/Sub Connector
      • Google Cloud Storage Export
      • Hubspot Connector
      • Intercom Connector
      • Migrator 3000
      • PagerDuty Connector
      • PostgreSQL Export
      • Redshift Export
      • RudderStack Export
      • Salesforce Connector
      • Sendgrid Connector
      • Sentry Connector
      • Snowflake Export
      • Twilio Connector
      • Variance Connector
      • Zapier Connector
      • Downsampler
      • Event Sequence Timer
      • First Time Event Tracker
      • Property Filter
      • Property Flattener
      • Schema Enforcer
      • Taxonomy Standardizer
      • Unduplicator
      • Automatic Cohort Creator
      • Currency Normalizer
      • GeoIP Enricher
      • Timestamp Parser
      • URL Normalizer
      • User Agent Populator
  • Tutorials
    • All tutorials
    • Actions
    • Apps
    • Cohorts
    • Dashboards
    • Feature flags
    • Funnels
    • Heatmaps
    • Path analysis
    • Retention
    • Session recording
    • Trends
  • Support
  • Glossary
  • Docs
  • Building apps
  • Testing

Testing

Last updated: Sep 22, 2022

On this page

  • Adding testing capabilities to your app
  • Writing tests
  • Using the app scaffold
  • Running tests

In order to ensure apps are stable and work as expected for all their users, we highly recommend writing tests for every app you build.

Adding testing capabilities to your app

You will need to add jest and our app testing scaffold to your project in your package.json file:

JSON
"jest": {
"testEnvironment": "node"
},
"scripts": {
"test": "jest ."
},
"devDependencies": {
"@posthog/plugin-scaffold": "0.10.0",
"jest": "^27.0.4"
}

Create your test files e.g. index.test.js or index.test.ts for testing your index.js or index.ts file

Writing tests

Write tests in jest, you can learn more about the syntax and best practices in the jest documentation. We recommend writing tests to cover the primary functions of your app (e.g. does it create events in the expected format) and also for edge cases (e.g. does it crash if no data is sent).

Using the app scaffold

Since most PostHog apps are likely to rely on PostHog specific features like "processEvent" we have a number of helper functions to mock these.

  • CreateEvent - This will mock an event being created in PostHog e.g. createEvent({ event: "booking completed", properties: { amount: "20", currency: "USD" } })
  • CreateIdentify - This will mock an identify event e.g. createIdentify()

More detail on other helper functions and how to use them can be found in our hello world example and in the utils library

These helper functions can be added to your test script using the following line:

JavaScript
const { createEvent, createIdentify} = require("@posthog/plugin-scaffold/test/utils");

For testing cron activities (e.g. run every minute), we recommend testing the functions that are called from this cron in your test - rather than trying to mock the cron event.

Running tests

If you have configured your package.json file as above you should be able to run

Terminal
npm run test

And your tests will execute.

Questions?

Was this page useful?

Next article

TypeScript types

PostHog supports TypeScript apps natively, without you having to compile the TypeScript yourself (although you can also do that). To build a TypeScript app, you'll probably need some types, so read on. Installation To use the types in your app, you can install them as follows: Then, in your apps, you can use them like so:

Read next article

Author

  • Paul Hultgren
    Paul Hultgren

Share

Jump to:

  • Adding testing capabilities to your app
  • Writing tests
  • Using the app scaffold
  • Running tests
  • Questions?
  • Edit this page
  • Raise an issue
  • Toggle content width
  • Toggle dark mode
  • Product

  • Overview
  • Pricing
  • Product analytics
  • Session recording
  • A/B testing
  • Feature flags
  • Apps
  • Customer stories
  • PostHog vs...
  • Docs

  • Quickstart guide
  • Self-hosting
  • Installing PostHog
  • Building an app
  • API
  • Webhooks
  • How PostHog works
  • Data privacy
  • Using PostHog

  • Product manual
  • Apps manuals
  • Tutorials
  • Community

  • Questions?
  • Product roadmap
  • Contributors
  • Partners
  • Newsletter
  • Merch
  • PostHog FM
  • PostHog on GitHub
  • Handbook

  • Getting started
  • Company
  • Strategy
  • How we work
  • Small teams
  • People & Ops
  • Engineering
  • Product
  • Design
  • Marketing
  • Customer success
  • Company

  • About
  • Team
  • Investors
  • Press
  • Blog
  • FAQ
  • Support
  • Careers
© 2022 PostHog, Inc.
  • Code of conduct
  • Privacy policy
  • Terms