01-installation.md

Karma runs on Node.js and is available as an NPM package.

Installing Node.js

On Mac or Linux we recommend using NVM. On Windows, download Node.js from the official site or use the NVM PowerShell Module.

Note: Karma currently works on Node.js 4.x, 5.x, 6.x, 7.x, and 8.x. See FAQ for more info.

Installing Karma and plugins

The recommended approach is to install Karma (and all the plugins your project needs) locally in the project's directory.

# Install Karma:
$ npm install karma --save-dev

# Install plugins that your project needs:
$ npm install karma-jasmine karma-chrome-launcher jasmine-core --save-dev

This will install karma, karma-jasmine, karma-chrome-launcher and jasmine-core packages into node_modules in your current working directory and also save these as devDependencies in package.json, so that any other developer working on the project will only have to do npm install in order to get all these dependencies installed.

# Run Karma:
$ ./node_modules/karma/bin/karma start

Commandline Interface

Typing ./node_modules/karma/bin/karma start sucks and so you might find it useful to install karma-cli globally. You will need to do this if you want to run Karma on Windows from the command line.

$ npm install -g karma-cli

Then, you can run Karma simply by karma from anywhere and it will always run the local version.