Writing Truffle tests with async/await

The documentation and sample projects with Truffle use promise chaining to write the test code.  As someone from the C# world, coming into the JS world it was getting really confusing to keep track (as well as all the variables I’d have to declare outside of the promise chain to use later).

I did a bit of research and found a way to do async/await in Truffle. I have put up a small simple repo by taking the truffle init project sample, and then doing a straight 1:1 conversion of their promise chaining tests over to the async/await format to help illustrate the difference. I really like the async/await version, as it is cleaner to read and much more compact (as you can see in the before/after screenshots below).

You can find the repo at https://github.com/DavidBurela/TruffleAsyncTests

 

before – promise chaining https://github.com/DavidBurela/TruffleAsyncTests/blob/master/test/metacoin.js

 

after – with async/await https://github.com/DavidBurela/TruffleAsyncTests/blob/master/test/asyncmetacoin.js

 

A shout out to Jim McDonald for pointing me to his GitHub repo where he had implemented async tests to get me started.