execFile not being called

Question

I'm having a problem and not even really sure where to begin troubleshooting.

I'm using a slightly modified mocha-casperjs. CasperJS is a wrapper for PhantomJS. I'm trying to integrate Growl notifications on completion of my tests.

I can execute notifications successfully before the call to mocha.run, like so:

execFile("terminal-notifier", ["-message", "Tests Begin"], null, function (err, stdout, stderr) {
  console.log("execFileSTDOUT:", JSON.stringify(stdout))
  console.log("execFileSTDERR:", JSON.stringify(stderr))
})



// for convience, expose the current runner on the mocha global
    mocha.runner = mocha.run(function() {
    ...

However, this fails:

// for convience, expose the current runner on the mocha global
mocha.runner = mocha.run(function() {
    execFile("terminal-notifier", ["-message", "Tests Begin"], null, function (err, stdout, stderr) {
      console.log("execFileSTDOUT:", JSON.stringify(stdout))
      console.log("execFileSTDERR:", JSON.stringify(stderr))
    })
    ...

I don't know much about the guts of Mocha, or of PhantomJS. Could Mocha be eating the stdout or something like that, causing the execFile call to fail? Is there something else I'm not getting?

Thanks, Kevin

--- UPDATE ---

The plot thickens. Just including the casper object kills execFile.

Running the below code with "casperjs test.js" successfully outputs execFile. Uncommenting the casper object results in no output.

'use strict';
var process = require("child_process");
var spawn = process.spawn;
var execFile = process.execFile;

execFile("ls", ["-lF", "/usr"], null, function (err, stdout, stderr) {
  console.log("execFileSTDOUT:", JSON.stringify(stdout));
  console.log("execFileSTDERR:", JSON.stringify(stderr));
});

//var casper = require('casper').create();
//casper.exit();

Answer 1

You can try changing the log line to this one:

console.log("execFileSTDOUT:" + JSON.stringify(stdout));

Then, you should see, if execFile is called: execFileSTDOUT:""

Answer 2

I ran into the same issue. execFile runs asynchronously, so you need to give it a chance to execute. By exiting CasperJS immediately, there is no output because ls didn't finish and so the callback wasn't called. One work around is using setTimeout. Here is what I did in PhantomJS. I assume it would be the same for CasperJS.

'use strict';
var process = require("child_process");
var spawn = process.spawn;
var execFile = process.execFile;

execFile("ls", ["-lF", "/usr"], null, function (err, stdout, stderr) {
  console.log("execFileSTDOUT:", JSON.stringify(stdout));
  console.log("execFileSTDERR:", JSON.stringify(stderr));
});

setTimeout(function() { phantom.exit(0) },1000);