Q:

How to automate karma unit tests with continuous integration

Currently we run our karma/jasmine unit tests a gulp task: gulp test
We are trying to figure out how to get circleci to run our tests automatically. I tried adding gulp test under the test: section of the circle.yml file but I get gulp: command not found. But I get the same error if I try something basic like pwd. So clearly I'm doing something wrong.
I think the same results could be achieved by using the scripts property in the package.json, because circleci runs that automatically, but I'm not sure how to do that.
Here's our circle.yml file...
dependencies:
  override:
    - echo PHP rules

test:
  override:
    - gulp test #this doesnt work!

deployment:
  development:
    branch: dev
    heroku:
      appname: ourapp

Here's package.json...
{
  "name": "ourapp",
  "private": true,
  "description": "An app",
  "main": "index.js",
  "dependencies": {
    "gulp": "~3.8.5"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "karma": "~0.12.31",
    "karma-chrome-launcher": "~0.1.7",
    "jasmine-core": "~2.2.0",
    "karma-jasmine": "~0.3.5",
    "karma-firefox-launcher": "~0.1.4",
    "karma-ie-launcher": "~0.1.5",
    "karma-opera-launcher": "~0.1.0",
    "karma-phantomjs-launcher": "~0.1.4",
    "gulp": "~3.8.10",
    "gulp-karma": "0.0.4",
    "karma-coverage": "~0.2.7"
  },
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  "author": "The A Team"
}

Just in case it's useful, here's the gulp task...
gulp.task('test', function(){
  return gulp.src(testFiles)
    .pipe(karma({
      configFile: 'karma.conf.js',
      action: 'run' //change to watch if you want to auto-run 
    }))
    .on('error', function(err){
      throw err;
    })
});

For consistency, I think the best would be if we could get circleci to run the gulp task, but it's okay if we have to run karma ... manually.

A:

Here's what worked for me:
dependencies:
  pre:
    - npm install -g gulp

test:
  override:
    - gulp test

machine:
  php:
    version: 5.6.2

The npm install -g gulp was the missing piece for me. Circleci will detect package.json and run npm install automatically, but I needed the pre: to install it globally in order for my gulp task to work.
It's also worth mentioning that circleci automatically knows whether the karma/jasmine tests passed or failed by detecting the exit code. So this just works as-is. 

A:

I'm one of the CircleCI devs. What you'll need to do is to specify a NodeJS version to build with in your circle.yml in order to trigger the NodeJS inference rules - https://circleci.com/docs/language-nodejs
Once you've done that we'll run npm install, npm test etc. automatically.
For npm test to do the right thing you'll need to configure your test script correctly. Best to get that running on your local environment first.
You'll probably also need to add gulp-cli as a dev dependency too, most NodeJS tools these days split the library and cli binary into separate packages.

