Sounding

Sounding is a testing framework for Sails applications and The Boring JavaScript Stack.

It is designed to be:

• a Sails hook first
• a CLI second
• powered by the native Node.js test runner
• integrated with Playwright for browser testing
• elegant for helper, endpoint, JSON API, Inertia, mail, and browser trials

The canonical Sails-native surface is:

• optional config/sounding.js when you need overrides
• sails.sounding
• sails.helpers.user.signupWithTeam(...) inside trials
• get('/api/issues') or sails.sounding.request.get('/api/issues') inside endpoint-style trials
• await auth.login.withPassword('[email protected]', page, { password: 'secret123' }) inside browser trials
• await auth.request.withPassword('[email protected]', { password: 'secret123' }) inside request trials
• request helpers default to Sails virtual requests powered by sails.request()
• Inertia-style visits can use visit('/pricing') and partial reload options like { component, only }
• a trial can opt into stricter parity with test('...', { transport: 'http' }, ...)
• any trial can also scope a request client with sails.sounding.request.using('http')

Sounding also owns its own built-in world engine, so the same package can:

• define factories under tests/factories
• define scenarios under tests/scenarios
• load named worlds for endpoint and browser trials
• capture outgoing mail by wrapping sails.helpers.mail.send and storing normalized messages in sails.sounding.mailbox

The default configuration story is intentionally calm:

• Sounding disables its hook automatically when Sails runs in production
• set sounding.enableInProduction = true only for controlled production-like environments such as staging
• auth conventions auto-detect User/userId and Creator/creatorId, with sounding.auth available for overrides
• Sounding manages a temporary sails-sqlite datastore by default
• managed SQLite artifacts live under .tmp/db
• the default datastore identity is default
• browser projects start with desktop
• inherit remains available when an app already has a serious test datastore story

This repository starts with docs-driven product research and the first hook/runtime scaffolding for that vision.

See RESEARCH.md.