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Configuring the jsPsych development environment
Setup
JsPsych is written using TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript that adds static typing, but compiles to plain JavaScript. The TypeScript compiler itself is written in JavaScript and can be run by Node.js, a runtime to execute JavaScript code without a web browser. Node.js comes with a package manager called NPM (Node Package Manager) that can install JavaScript libraries to run on your machine, such as TypeScript and other build tools for jsPsych. In order to work on code in the jsPsych repository, it is recommended that you follow the steps below to set up your development environment.
Install Node.js
The JsPsych development setup requires Node.js >= v14 to be installed on your machine.
We recommend that you install version 16 since it includes version 7 of NPM (required for the workspaces feature that the jsPsych repository uses).
If you are bound to Node.js v14, make sure to install NPM v7 manually (via npm install -g npm@7).
Clone the repository and install the dependencies
In a terminal, run:
git clone https://github.com/jspsych/jsPsych.git
cd jsPsych
npm install
The latter command will install all the dependencies that are required to build and test jsPsych. Afterwards, it will run the build chain for all packages in the jsPsych repository.
!!! info Depending on your system, this step will take some time. If you would like to use that time efficiently, consider reading the section below to know what's happening.
Build chain and build artifacts
TODO describe the steps and artifacts, and how to run it / use the artifacts
There are different versions of the JavaScript language specification and not all web browsers and browser versions support all JavaScript features. That's why jsPsych uses a build chain to translate the source files into code that a majority of web browsers can understand.
Testing
Automated code testing for jsPsych is implemented with Jest.
To run the tests, install Node and npm. Run npm install in the root jsPsych directory. Then run npm test. You can also run npm test in the directory of the package that you would like to test. For example, if you are developing tests for the html-keyboard-response plugin you can run npm test in /packages/plugin-html-keyboard-response.
Tests for the core jsPsych library are located in /packages/jspsych/tests.
Tests for plugins and extensions are located in the /src folder of the corresponding package. Test files for plugins and extensions are named index.spec.ts.
There are helper functions for testing in /packages/jspsych/tests/utils.ts. We recommend looking at other test files to observe conventions for testing.