How to test Axios in Jest by Example

Every once in a while we need to test API requests. Axios is one of the most popular JavaScript libraries to fetch data from remote APIs. Hence, we will use Axios for our data fetching example — however, the following tutorial should make it possible to exchange axios with any other data fetching library.

javascript

import axios from 'axios';

export const API = 'https://hn.algolia.com/api/v3';

export const fetchData = async query => {
  const url = `${API}/search?query=${query}`;

  return await axios.get(url);
};

fetchData('react');

In this data fetching example with axios, we provide a query parameter to the function to search on Hacker News via its API. If the request is successful, we will return the response. If the request runs into a network error, the function will throw an error which we would have to capture outside of it.

Now we are going to use Jest to test the asynchronous data fetching function. Jest is used as a test runner (alternative: Mocha), but also as an assertion utility (alternative: Chai). In addition, it comes with utilities to spy, stub, and mock (asynchronous) functions. That’s how we will use Jest to mock Axios.

javascript

import { fetchData } from './';

describe('fetchData', () => {
  it('fetches successfully data from an API', async () => {

  });

  it('fetches erroneously data from an API', async () => {

  });
});

First, we will mock Axios with Jest. And second, we will give Axios’ get method a mock implementation to resolve and reject a promise for both tests.

javascript

import axios from 'axios';

import { fetchData } from './';

jest.mock('axios');

describe('fetchData', () => {
  it('fetches successfully data from an API', async () => {
    const data = {
      data: {
        hits: [
          {
            objectID: '1',
            title: 'a',
          },
          {
            objectID: '2',
            title: 'b',
          },
        ],
      },
    };

    axios.get.mockImplementationOnce(() => Promise.resolve(data));
  });

  it('fetches erroneously data from an API', async () => {
    const errorMessage = 'Network Error';

    axios.get.mockImplementationOnce(() =>
      Promise.reject(new Error(errorMessage)),
    );
  });
});

Last but not least, we will make our assertion with Jest in the cases of resolving the promise successfully or erroneously:

javascript

import axios from 'axios';

import { fetchData } from './';

jest.mock('axios');

describe('fetchData', () => {
  it('fetches successfully data from an API', async () => {
    const data = {...};

    axios.get.mockImplementationOnce(() => Promise.resolve(data));

    await expect(fetchData('react')).resolves.toEqual(data);
  });

  it('fetches erroneously data from an API', async () => {
    const errorMessage = 'Network Error';

    axios.get.mockImplementationOnce(() =>
      Promise.reject(new Error(errorMessage)),
    );

    await expect(fetchData('react')).rejects.toThrow(errorMessage);
  });
});

As bonus, we can also assert that Axios’ get has been called with the correct URL:

javascript

import axios from 'axios';

import { fetchData, API } from './';

jest.mock('axios');

describe('fetchData', () => {
  it('fetches successfully data from an API', async () => {
    const data = {...};

    axios.get.mockImplementationOnce(() => Promise.resolve(data));

    await expect(fetchData('react')).resolves.toEqual(data);

    expect(axios.get).toHaveBeenCalledWith(
      `${API}/search?query=react`,
    );
  });

  ...
});

That’s it for creating a Jest mock for Axios by going through one example. You can find this Axios mocking with Jest example in this GitHub repository. A few more thoughts:

If you want to mock a post instead of a get request for Axios, just apply the mockImplementationOnce() for axios.post instead of axios.get.
If you want to have a proper network error, for instance a status code 404, then you have to create a custom JavaScript error for it.
Last but not least, head over to this tutorial if you want to see how data fetching with Axios can be tested in React with Jest and Enzyme.

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