node.js - Mocha requires make. Can't find a make.exe that works on Windows

Question

Mocha (test framework for Node.js) uses make.

For the life of me I can't find a compatible make.exe for Windows.

Everything works fine on my Mac.

I've tried using VS's nmake.exe and a make.exe I found that was ported from Unix. But they are all incompatible.

It can't just be me

Here's the makefile:

test:
    @./node_modules/.bin/mocha -u tdd -R spec

.PHONY: test

make barfs on the . in PHONY, and even if I remove it, it never runs the mocha command (or at least there's no output).

Running ./node_modules/.bin/mocha -u -tdd -R spec directly gives me my test report:

first suite -
  ? ten should always be equal to 9+1
  ? zero is less all positive numbers
  ? There is no i in team

 ? 3 tests complete (8ms)

EDIT 3/25/12

• In the end, the easiest way to deal with this is to use Cygwin and ensure that the developer packages for Cygwin are installed. In PowerShell I did Set-Alias make "c:devutilscygwininmake.exe" and now make test works on standard Mocha Makefiles.

Answer 1

Heh I feel you ;) I'm part of a team busy building a new startup using node. Two of our dev's are on on OSX, one is on Linux. I am on Windows.

I downloaded and use GNU's "Make for Windows" and can now quite happily make our installation & test suites.

Also, I STRONGLY encourage you to use PowerShell - it has a bunch of commands aliased to UNIX-friendly commands (e.g. Get-ChildItem -> ls). This allows several of our scripts to work on UNIX or Windows without change.

So, to your issue:

Try replacing your makefile above with the following:

# Detect if we're running Windows
ifdef SystemRoot
    # If so, set the file & folder deletion commands:
    FixPath = $(subst /,,$1)
else
    # Otherwise, assume we're running *N*X:
    FixPath = $1
endif

NODE_MODULES := ./node_modules/.bin/

test: 
    $(call FixPath, NODE_MODULES)mocha -u tdd -R spec

.PHONY: test

Note: with Makefiles, tasks within targets must be indented with tab characters, not spaces! Go figure!!

I stole the FixPath routine from this post (thanks Paul :)). It replaces a string's / with if run on Windows.

One of the problems with make on Windows is that it shells out to NT's command shell (via CreateProcess) in order to execute each task. This means that any NX-isms that Powershell would otherwise handle (e.g. ls, cat, etc.) won't work when executing makefiles. Thus, its advisable to replace inline commands with overridable aliases that you can set to one command for NT and another for NX.

Perhaps I'll get around to forking Gnu Make and seeing if I can get it to shell out to Powershell when executing commands instead of the NT command line. That would also eliminate the need for FixPaths above ;)

Ping me if you get stuck ;)