Unexpected breaking change in Test Runner in v21

[egoroof]

Version

v21.0.0

Platform

windows 11

Subsystem

No response

What steps will reproduce the bug?

As from official v20 documentation (Running tests from the command line) it was allowed to run tests in following command:

node --test custom_test_dir/

The test runner will recursively search the custom_test_dir/ directory for test files to execute.

But in v21 it is not working anymore:

Why is it a breaking change for stable API ?

How often does it reproduce? Is there a required condition?

No response

What is the expected behavior? Why is that the expected behavior?

Stable API from official documentation should not be changed in every major version

What do you see instead?

see "What steps will reproduce the bug" chapter

Additional information

No response

[meyfa]

I warned about this exact behavior change in the original PR: #47653 (comment)

The reasoning seems to be that performance would be impacted and it would be hard to understand which files are selected by a glob and which aren't.

While I think the breaking change is unfortunate, I think it's somewhat reasonable because with a glob you can specify file extensions properly, for example, while the v20 test runner only ever loads files with very specific names.

[cjihrig]

@MoLow is this expected behavior with the new glob support?

[MoLow]

Yes, node --test directory should be replaced with node --test directory/**/*.test.?(c|m)js or a similar pattern
this is part of why adding glob was a breaking change

[TKDev7]

I suppose this can be closed then?

[Pyrolistical]

Also, it seems like if you don't specify a directory the default glob works. So for some people replacing node --test directory with node --test works if all the tests happen to be in directory anyways