The @salesforce/cli-plugins-testkit library provides test utilities to assist Salesforce CLI plug-in authors with writing NUTs (non-unit-tests), like integration, smoke, and e2e style testing. For example, you could write tests to ensure your plugin commands execute properly using an isolated Salesforce project, scratch org, and different Salesforce CLI executables.

Add this library as a dev dependencies to your project.

yarn add @salesforce/cli-plugins-testkit --dev

Create a test file and import the utilities from this library that you'd like to use.

Using a different file extension will help separate your unit tests from your NUTs even if they are in the same directories. For example, if you use mytest.nut.ts instead of mytest.test.ts, you can have the following scripts in your package.json (assuming mocha).

{
  "scripts": {
    "test": "mocha **/*.test.ts",
    "test-nut": "mocha **/*.nut.ts"
  }
}

See Samples doc for many testkit usecases and sample code

Here are some public github repos for plugins that use this library for NUTs:

• @salesforce/plugin-alias
• @salesforce/plugin-auth
• @salesforce/plugin-config
• @salesforce/plugin-data
• @salesforce/plugin-org
• @salesforce/plugin-user

Although oclif provides a way to run commands locally using the local bin/run file...

import { exec } from 'shelljs';
const result = exec('./bin/run mycommand --myflag --json');
console.log(JSON.parse(result.stdout));

...that doesn't provide flexibility to target different CLI executables in Continuous Integration (CI). For example, you may want to run NUTs against the newly published version of your plugin using the latest-rc of the Salesforce CLI to make sure everything still works as expected.

The testkit provides execCmd which uses the TESTKIT_EXECUTABLE_PATH environment variable to run a plugin command, in addition to other useful builtin utilties such as json parsing, return type casting (for TypeScript) and command execution timing.

import { execCmd } from '@salesforce/cli-plugins-testkit';

const result = execCmd<MyReturntype>('mycommand --myflag --json').jsonOutput;
expect(result.name).to.equal('expectedName');

# Install the release candidate in the current directory using NPM
npm install sfdx@latest-rc

# Install the newly published version of my plugin
./node_modules/.bin/sfdx plugins:install myplugin

# Target the local sfdx
export TESTKIT_EXECUTABLE_PATH=./node_modules/.bin/sfdx

# Run NUTs (requires a test:nuts script target in the package.json)
yarn test:nuts

You will notice that the executable is not configurable in the execCmd method directly. If you need to run other commands not located in your plugin, use shelljs directly.

import { exec } from 'shelljs';
import { execCmd } from '@salesforce/cli-plugins-testkit';

await exec('sfdx auth:jwt:grant ... --json');
const result = await execCmd('mycommand --myflag --json');