Passing arguments to AVA test files

Question

I'm looking for ways to pass arguments to my ava test file via command line and I found this documentation. https://github.com/avajs/ava/blob/main/docs/recipes/passing-arguments-to-your-test-files.md

// test.js const test = require('ava');

test('argv', t => {
    t.deepEqual(process.argv.slice(2), ['--hello', 'world']);
});

$ npx ava -- --hello world

I was wondering that what this code is actually doing but I can't find other related topic online talking about this. Is there anyone who can explain to me?

Answer 1

This code is just showing you that in node - and therefore also in ava, the arguments are available on the array process.argv. You can find it documented here

The slice(2) just trims off the first two elements of the array. From the documentation I linked above, this is because:

The first element will be process.execPath.

The second element will be the path to the JavaScript file being executed

So your arguments start at process.argv[2].

The t.deepEqual is just illustrative to show the reader that the value of process.argv.slice(2) is:

 ['--hello', 'world']