As I managed to come up with a solution myself, I thought it would be a good idea to share it. The approach might not be flawless, but it's the first one that seemed to work. Feel free to post improvements and suggestions.

What I did in a nutshell:

• Launch an instance of Xvfb, a virtual framebuffer


• Using JsTestDriver:
  
  
  
  
  • launch an instance of Firefox into the virtual framebuffer (headlessly)
  
  
  • capture the Firefox instance and run the test suite
  
  
  • generate JUnit-compliant test results .XML
  
  


• Use Bamboo to inspect the results file to pass or fail the build

I will next go through the more detailed phases. This is what my my directory structure ended up looking like:

lib/

    JsTestDriver.jar

test/

    qunit/

            equiv.js

            QUnitAdapter.js

    jsTestDriver.conf

    run_js_tests.sh

    tests.js

test-reports/

build.xml

On the build server:

• Install Xvfb (apt-get install Xvfb)


• Install Firefox (apt-get install firefox)

Into your application to be built:

• Install JsTestDriver: http://code.google.com/p/js-test-driver/
  
  
  
  
  • add the QUnit adapters equiv.js and QUnitAdapter.js
  
  
  • configure JsTestDriver (jsTestDriver.conf):
  
  

server: http://localhost:4224



load:

# Load QUnit adapters (may be omitted if QUnit is not used)

  - qunit/equiv.js

  - qunit/QUnitAdapter.js   



# Tests themselves (you'll want to add more files)

  - tests.js

Create a script file for running the unit tests and generating test results (example in Bash, run_js_tests.sh):

#!/bin/bash

# directory to write output XML (if this doesn't exist, the results will not be generated!)

OUTPUT_DIR=../test-reports

mkdir $OUTPUT_DIR



XVFB=`which Xvfb`

if [ $? -eq 1 ];

then

    echo Xvfb not found.

    exit 1

fi



FIREFOX=`which firefox`

if [ $? -eq 1 ];

then

    echo Firefox not found.

    exit 1

fi



$XVFB :99 -ac &    # launch virtual framebuffer into the background

PID_XVFB=$!      # take the process ID

export DISPLAY=:99 # set display to use that of the xvfb



# run the tests

java -jar ../lib/JsTestDriver.jar --config jsTestDriver.conf --port 4224 --browser $FIREFOX --tests all --testOutput $OUTPUT_DIR



kill $PID_XVFB     # shut down xvfb (firefox will shut down cleanly by JsTestDriver)

echo Done.

Create an Ant target that calls the script:

<target name=test>        

    <exec executable=cmd osfamily=windows>

        <!-- This might contain something different in a Windows environment -->

    </exec>



    <exec executable=/bin/bash dir=test osfamily=unix>

        <arg value=run_js_tests.sh />

    </exec>

</target>   

Finally, tell the Bamboo build plan to both invoke the test target and look for JUnit test results. Here the default **/test-reports/*.xml will do fine.