Unleash hordes of zombies to tear your test suite to shreds in record time!

Horde is designed to solve a fairly specific problem: speeding up very long running integration test suites which use the Mocha test framework to run the Zombie.js headless browser against a fairly typical LAMP powered website.

It assumes that the bottleneck in such a scenario is largely the DB layer; both in terms of priming it with test data and in terms of contention over it: parallelism is hard when multiple test suites are all squabbling over the same test database.

By splitting your test suite up into multiple smaller ones and running them in parallel inside individual docker containers. This not only completely isolates each database instance but also the entire LAMP server itself. The master horde process stitches the results of each container's test results into a JUnit compatible XML file making horde perfect for use in continuous integration environments. As an added bonus, running multiple processes will make much better use of multi-core processors than a single NodeJS instance.

Because running large integration suites in parallel - in my experience at least - can yield huge speed increases. A sample suite of 1,050 tests which previously took 9 minutes 20 seconds to run now executes in 1 minute 26 seconds - roughly 85% faster.

Coming soon.