Add ability to specify relative path to reporter as local script

[jakerella]

(Note this issue was split from #1821.)

I would like to implement my own local reporter as a script for a project. This would not be an npm package, just a local script. The --reporter documentation suggest this is possible: "To load a reporter from a local Node.js script, use --require instead." I can't get this working, and I've also tried adding my script to the to QUnit.config.reporters array, and just writing a function directly into the reporters object, but that didn't work (and seemed wrong anyway).

I did eventually get this working using the --reporter CLI option:

qunit --reporter /home/jakerella/my-project/test/reporter.cjs test/my-tests.cjs

Or I can navigate out of the qunit directory structure inside /node_modules: ../../../../test/reporter.cjs (ew)

This is because the require in find-reporter doesn't take into account the current working directory of the run. This is sort of okay, except that I want other people to be able to run the tests, so I'd have to document how to do this really well. I don't see a great way around this right now because I can't specify the "reporter" using QUnit.config or add my own reporter to the "reporters" built-in object.

I think there are a couple possibilities here:

1. Add a "reporter" option to QUnit.config for specifying a custom (local) reporter
2. Detecting a custom reporter via a path prefix like ./ or ../ and then using path.resolve() inside find-reporter so that the file can be required using a relative path on the command line.
3. Allowing the developer to add a reporter to the reporters object and maybe using the filename as the key?

Let me know if any of these is of interest and I can probably submit a PR for it.

[Krinkle]

This makes sense to me. We should support this.

As a workaround, one of thes alternatives should work for you:

• --require
• --reporter via relative file ref in package.json
• TAP formatter

The --require option would mean you import and initialize the reporter yourself along with any other setup you might want. The downside is that this would activate in addition to the default TAP reporter, so while fine for perhaps generating something like a JUnit XML file, doesn't work as a way to make an alternative output format unless you set the default to a no-op option. We don't have a --reporter none value today, but, we do have --reporter perf which is essentially the same thing. It's a bit of a hack, but works.

$ qunit --reporter perf --require ./test/setup.js

const myreporter = require('./reporter.cjs');

myreporter.init(QUnit);

If you define your reporter in package.json with the file: scheme, then Node.js lets other code import it as a bare package name. I don't like this long-term, but it can make sense as a temporary measure leading up to publishing it to npm, or to override a package that you've forked.

$ qunit --reporter mymyrporeter

{
  "devDependencies": {
     "myreporter": "file:./test/reporter.cjs"
  }
}

If your reporter can get all its information from a TAP stream, then a piped approach might work. You'd probably want to use tap-parser or another tap reporter to get started.

$ qunit test/ | node test/reporter.cjs

[jakerella]

Interesting. These are good alternatives... so I guess the question is: do we want to just document these, or do we want to implement relative path detection for the --reporter option? (Or something else?)