Testing

Every change needs tests, and every file must clear ≥90% on lines, statements, functions, and branches. That rule and the React/Mantine conventions live in AGENTS.md; this skill is where a test goes, how to run it, and how to clear the gate.

Before you write it: does the test use a test-servers/ fixture?

If it does, load the test-servers skill now — that is step one, before choosing a location or writing a line.

⚠️ Load it before searching the code, not after. A task phrased as end-to-end or integration coverage of an MCP operation — listing tools, paginating a list, calling a tool, reading a resource — almost always stands a fixture up, so treat that phrasing as the answer to the question above and load test-servers first. Grepping for an existing test to copy is not a substitute: the fixture you find that way (a config under test-servers/configs/) does not tell you which of the three shapes below drives it, or that it can be stale. If the skill then shows the case needs no fixture, you have lost one skill load.

The condition is "does this test depend on a fixture from test-servers/?" — not which tier it lands in, and not which directory it lands in. There are two ways to depend on one, and they need different halves of that skill:

• It connects to a fixture. An integration test that connects; an end-to-end test that connects; a smoke that drives a connected flow; a coverage gap only reachable over a real connection; reproducing a reported bug against a server. These need the whole procedure — the staleness hazard, and then whichever half matches how the server is stood up. ⚠️ Which shape you need depends on what is driving, and there are three. All three are the "Three ways to use a fixture" section of test-servers, which names the entry point and a reference for each — read the right third:

  • An integration or CLI test → in-process HTTP. createTestServerHttp(...) / .start() / .stop(), with the test owning the lifecycle. Use it when the case needs HTTP or SSE, a specific tool set, or the modern handler (modern: {} is a constructor option). No showcase config and no era table apply.
  • An integration or CLI test where stdio is the point → spawned stdio. getTestMcpServerCommand() handed to a stdio transport or to the built CLI, which spawns it. A subprocess is started, but it runs the stdio fixture's default config, so there is still nothing to pick — and nothing to override, so if the case needs a specific tool set it is an in-process HTTP test instead.
  • A config-driven web smoke, or pack:verify → spawned composable HTTP. smoke:web:elicitation, smoke:web:app, smoke:web:tabs and pack:verify all spawn server-composable.js --config <name>.json. The showcase-config and protocol-era guidance applies to you in full — being automated does not exempt a smoke from it.

  ⚠️ "A smoke" is not a shape, so do not route by that word. smoke:cli uses the first two — an in-process createTestServerHttp for the header round-trip, and the built stdio entry in a --catalog for the connect checks — and smoke:tui uses the stdio entry alone. Only the web smokes above are config-driven. Pick by what the caller actually stands up.

  What applies to all three is that section's build warning. ⚠️ Connecting is a strong hint, not the rule. A few integration tests deliberately hand-roll a JSON-RPC server because the composable fixture cannot produce what they assert on — inspectorClient-malformed-list.test.ts and listSalvage-era.test.ts need wire shapes the SDK's own server refuses to emit. Real transport, real client, no test-servers/ dependency. Check whether a fixture can express the case before reaching for one.

• It names or runs the built fixture without connecting. smoke:tui boots the TUI against a catalog whose stdio command is the built fixture, then asserts it survives. No transport is driven and no protocol era applies, but the build and staleness half lands on it in full.

⚠️ "A build ran" is not the dependency — using the artefact is. clients/web's pretest runs test-servers:build before every unit run, so the fixture is on disk for tests that never reference it. What counts is whether the test starts, spawns, configures, or hands a built entry to the subject under test. That last clause is what covers smoke:tui, which drives no transport at all and still depends on the fixture — see the build-only bullet above.

⚠️ And importing the package is not the dependency either. The barrel exports plain functions as well as server factories, so a test can import from it and never stand a server up — src/test/core/mcp/test-server-scope.test.ts imports createScopeCheckMiddleware and friends to unit-test the scope middleware as a pure function, with no start() anywhere in the file. None of the procedure applies to it — no config, no era, no lifecycle — it is an ordinary unit test that happens to import its subject from that package. Ask whether a server runs, not whether the import line is present.

So the condition does not hold when the test renders a component from fixture props, exercises a pure function or a parser, or is a smoke that touches no fixture — smoke:launcher checks --help, and smoke:web / smoke:web:browser only assert the SPA is served and paints.

⚠️ Neither the tier nor the folder decides this. src/test/integration/ holds storage/store-id.test.ts, which validates a string, and mcp/import/*, which parses config files, right beside the tests that drive a live connection. They sit there for the node env and the 30s timeout, not because they connect — placement is the project manifest, so it cannot also be the fixture trigger. Ask what the test does, not where it lives.

In the connecting case, the test drives a real server over a real transport, never a mock, and picking the fixture, building it, and connecting with the right protocol era is a procedure this skill does not carry. Writing one without test-servers means hand-rolling a fixture that already exists, or mocking the thing the tier exists to avoid mocking. In the build-only case, none of the transport or protocol-era guidance applies — what you need from test-servers is how to build the fixture and why a stale build keeps serving old code.

Where the test file goes

Side-by-side by default; src/test/ only for what can't be co-located; and the Node clients are different.

clients/web — side-by-side

<Name>.test.tsx (or .test.ts for non-React modules) next to the source. Components, hooks, lib/, utils/. This is the overwhelming majority; a web-owned test living under src/test/ instead is a bug.

clients/web/src/test/ is for the three things that cannot be co-located:

1. Tests of the repo-root core/ package → src/test/core/…, mirroring the core/ folder layout. core/ physically lives outside clients/web/, is consumed via the @inspector/core alias, and has no test harness of its own. This includes core/json/* and core/client/*.
2. The integration project → src/test/integration/…, mirroring the core/ source layout (mcp/, mcp/node/, mcp/remote/, auth/, auth/node/, storage/). Placement is the manifest — any file under that folder is picked up by the integration project (node env, 30s timeouts) via a folder glob; there is no enumeration to keep in sync. ⚠️ Placement is not the fixture trigger, though — this folder holds pure parser and storage tests alongside the connecting ones. If the test you are adding here needs a fixture from test-servers/, load that skill first; the fixture is half of that test. Connecting is a strong hint but not the rule — see the hand-rolled-server exception above.
3. Shared test infrastructure — renderWithMantine.tsx, setup.ts, fixtures/, scrollAreaStoryAssertions.ts.

clients/cli, clients/tui, clients/launcher — a top-level __tests__/

All their tests, not beside their source. Their tsconfig.json excludes **/*.test.* and their tsconfig.test.json includes __tests__/**/*, so a co-located src/**/*.test.* lands in no tsconfig project and fails npm run verify:typecheck-coverage (#1791).

Root tooling — scripts/*.test.mjs

A new scripts/*.mjs helper with pure logic gets a sibling *.test.mjs, run by npm run test:scripts (node's built-in runner; the root has no vitest harness by design). ⚠️ Keep the filename *.test.mjs — node --test silently skips a file its glob misses and still exits 0.

Running them

Scope	From	Command
Web unit	clients/web	npm run test (test:watch while iterating)
Web integration	clients/web	npm run test:integration
Web Storybook play fns	clients/web	npm run test:storybook
CLI	clients/cli	npm run test (pretest builds test-servers + the bin)
TUI	clients/tui	npm run test
Launcher	clients/launcher	npm run test
Root tooling	repo root	npm run test:scripts
Everything, fast	repo root	npm run validate
The coverage gate	repo root	npm run coverage

There is no aggregate root test script — each client self-validates.

In unit tests that expect error output, suppress it from the console.

The tiers, shallowest first

unit (test, per client) → web integration (test:integration, real transports/servers) → out-of-process (clients/cli/__tests__/e2e.test.ts, spawns the built binary) → smokes through the built launcher (npm run smoke) → Storybook play functions (test:storybook) → the published-tarball check (npm run pack:verify, local/release only — needs network).

⚠️ Depth in that list is not the fixture boundary, and the boundary cuts across the tiers rather than along them. Needing test-servers/: the web integration tests that drive one, the out-of-process CLI tests, the smokes that connect (smoke:cli, smoke:web:app, smoke:web:elicit, smoke:web:tabs), pack:verify, and smoke:tui — which never asserts a round trip but calls ensureTestServers({ requires: ["stdio"] }) and hands the built fixture to the TUI as its catalog's stdio command. Not needing it: the pure tests inside the same integration project, the connecting tests that deliberately hand-roll a server, smoke:launcher, smoke:web and smoke:web:browser (all three stop at boot without a fixture), and every Storybook play function (fixture props). Load the test-servers skill as soon as a task puts you on the fixture side of that line — whichever tier it sits in.

validate runs the per-client test scripts — so web unit plus cli's out-of-process e2e.test.ts, but not web's integration project, which runs inside the coverage gate. CI therefore has no separate test:integration step.

The coverage gate

Per-file ≥90 on all four dimensions, CI-enforced, across web, cli, tui and launcher. New code must clear 90 on every dimension.

Scope notes:

• The web coverage include (in clients/web/vite.config.ts) also covers the shared core/ runtime the browser consumes — core/mcp, core/react, core/auth, core/storage, core/logging, core/node, core/json, core/client.
• ⚠️ That include is a whitelist naming components/hooks/theme/ lib/utils/server. A module placed outside those directories falls out of the gate entirely, silently. The documented exceptions are src/App.tsx (a composition root at ~42% branch coverage — gating it is a dedicated decomposition effort) and the src/main.tsx / src/index.ts bootstraps.
• CLI tests run in-process by importing runCli() (__tests__/helpers/cli-runner.ts) so src is measured; src/index.ts is the only exclusion. commander uses .exitOverride() so a parse error throws instead of tearing down the test worker.
• TUI covers all of src/**, React surface included. Components mount through __tests__/helpers/renderTui.tsx — ink-testing-library's render with every frame ANSI-stripped — alongside the passthrough doubles in the same directory; keypresses are driven through stdin. The only exclusion is src/tui-servers.ts (a pure re-export, excluded so it doesn't surface as a misleading 0/0 row). ⚠️ Import render from that helper, not from ink-testing-library. Ink writes styling inside the styled run, so <Text underline>I</Text>nfo reaches the frame buffer with escapes between I and nfo and a plain toContain("Info") fails against a component that is rendering correctly. It only shows up where chalk emits color — a developer whose shell exports FORCE_COLOR — so CI, which has no TTY, stays green on a suite that is red for them (#2207). If a frame assertion fails on a string you can plainly see in the printed diff, that is the tell. Reach stdout.lastFrame() on the returned instance for the raw bytes.

When a v8 ignore is justified

A genuinely-unreachable branch is annotated at the source rather than waved through by lowering the gate. The acceptable reasons are enumerated in AGENTS.md — do not reach for one that is not on that list.

React tests: renderWithMantine

Always render through renderWithMantine (src/test/renderWithMantine.tsx) — it wraps in MantineProvider with the project theme. Do not hand-roll a bare MantineProvider; it skips the project theme and the helper's options and drifts from every other test.

Note the justification has changed and the old one is wrong: it sets env="test", which makes Mantine skip the animated render — but it does not stop the timers. env is read only at Transition.mjs's render branch, while useTransition() runs before that check and still schedules real window.setTimeouts (opening a <Modal> schedules three 200ms timers). What prevents a timer outliving its file — and throwing an uncaught ReferenceError: window is not defined that fails the whole run, attributed to an innocent file (#1760) — is the leaked-timer safety net in src/test/setup.ts, which is global and covers every unit test however it renders. The rule stands on consistency, not on timer safety.

• Forced color scheme: pass the option — renderWithMantine(ui, { colorScheme: "dark" }) — rather than hand-rolling defaultColorScheme="dark".
• Mid-flight transition state (e.g. asserting a data-anim="out" cell during an exit crossfade) is the only reason to use renderWithMantineTransitions. Pass settleMs derived from the component's real animation duration plus the helper's shared slack — HEADER_ANIM_MS + RAF_SLACK_MS, both imported, never a literal: the first term tracks the component and the second tracks how busy the machine is, and only the second should move when the machine gets busier (#2323). Do not also use vi.useFakeTimers() in that test: the auto-settle awaits a real setTimeout, so under fake timers it throws with a message telling you to call vi.useRealTimers() first — it does not silently skip. That is deliberate (a deadlock would otherwise hang until the project's hookTimeout), but it means the combination fails the test rather than degrading. If the test unmounts the tree itself use the unmount() the helper returns. The mechanism is documented at length on the helper — read there before changing it.

Storybook play functions

Every screen and element component has a *.stories.tsx; play functions double as interaction tests, run headless in CI and in the local gate.

⚠️ expect(...) from storybook/test returns a promise. Storybook instruments it, so every expect in a play function is awaited — as is any shared helper that wraps one.

Test servers, not mocks

The tests that drive MCP behaviour over a transport use a real server rather than a mock, and for the ones that get that server from test-servers/, load the skill and use all of it: which showcase config covers the feature, which protocol era to connect with, how to add a combination that does not exist yet, and why a fixture can keep serving stale code after an edit.

A test that only names the built fixture needs that skill too, for a narrower reason. smoke:tui boots the TUI against a catalog whose stdio command is the build output and asserts it survives — it opens no transport, so config choice and protocol era do not apply to it, but building the fixture and the staleness hazard do. Load the skill and take that half.

A pure test that happens to live in the integration project, and a smoke that references no fixture, need neither (see the tier list above) — and note that clients/web's pretest builds test-servers/ before every unit run, so its presence on disk says nothing about whether your test depends on it.