steal-socket.io

Ignore SSR

If your application uses real-time communication with socket.io and your server supports SSR then its a good idea to ignore socket.io module during SSR completely.

The steal-socket.io module maps socket.io-client/dist/socket.io to an @empty module, and stubs socket.io as minimally as possible.

Ignore can-zone

This wrapper is aware of can-zone module which helps to track asynchronous activity. It uses can-zone.ignore to skip the tracking of socket.io calls. For more information about what can-zone is checkout this article as well as the documentation.

Proxy and delay socket.io connection

This wrapper helps with testing and demoing applications that use socket.io for real-time communication.

Often some modules that use socket.io call it to establish a socket connection immediately. This makes mocking of socket.io impossible.

The wrapper delays the creation of socket connection till StealJS is done with loading all the modules (including the ones where we can mock socket.io).

How it works

The delay-io wrapper returns io-like function that resolves with a ProxySocket. The ProxySocket is a replacement for io.Socket and acts as a proxy for it.

Initially the wrapper records all calls to io and its socket into a FIFO storage, and then, when StealJS is done with loading all modules, it replays the recorded calls against the real io and its socket.

After replaying the wrapper directly proxies all the subsequent calls.

Usage

Import steal-socket.io which includes this wrapper as its part, or directly import steal-socket.io/delay-io to use just this wrapper.

Lets say we have an application myApp.js that uses socket.io and tries to establish the connection right during module evaluation. We import steal-socket.io in our app instead of socket.io-client/dist/socket.io:

var io = require("steal-socket.io");

var messages = [];

var socket = io("localhost");
io.on("messages", function(m){
    messages.push(m);
});

module.exports = {
    messages: messages
};

We now create a module myFixtureSocket.js that mocks socket.io server responses, e.g. using can-fixture-socket:

var io = require("socket.io-client/dist/socket.io");
var fixtureSocket = require("can-fixture-socket");
var mockSocket = new fixtureSocket( io );
mockSocket.on("connect", function(){
    mockSocket.emit("messages", "some messages");
});

And then we can test our application like this:

require("myFixtureSocket");
var myApp = require("my-app.js");

QUnit.test(function(){
    assert.equal(myApp.messages.length, 1, "Contains one message received from socket server.");
});