note: This message was valid at Karma in 2014 on January 16th. I'm not sure about the current state of this library, maybe they fixed their strange configuration logic and added meaningful error messages. If not, this post can probably be very helpful, fixing configuration problems related to karma.
These errors occur due to incorrect configuration. You must add everything that your test uses to the pattern file in your configuration file.
For example:
module.exports = function (config) { config.set({ basePath: './', frameworks: ['jasmine', 'requirejs'], files: [ {pattern: 'test/bootstrap.js', included: true}, {pattern: 'test/**/*.js', included: false}, {pattern: 'src/**/*.js', included: false}, {pattern: 'vendor/**/*.js', included: false} ], exclude: [ ], reporters: ['progress'], port: 9876, colors: true, logLevel: config.LOG_INFO, autoWatch: true, browsers: ['Firefox'], captureTimeout: 6000, singleRun: false }); };
In this example, bootstrap.js is the only HTML file included by Karma , other files are dependencies that are loaded by code into bootstrap.js. The order of the templates is very important and, unfortunately, it is far from logical: the next template does not cancel the previous one . Therefore, if I gave the test/**/*.js template as the first and test/bootstrap.js as the second, it would not work because bootstrap would not be included. In these cases, Karma sends you the message "empty testsuite" , which is useless if you do not know how to configure it ...
If your tests try to use a file that is not covered by the templates specified in the Karma configuration file, you will receive the error message "There is no timestamp for xy" , which is very similar to the previous "empty testsuite" . If you do not know the system, you will not have a clue what it means or what you need to do to fix it ...
Part of the exclude object of the configuration object is for files that have been added to file templates for inclusion, but you do not want to include or use them in your tests. These can be, for example, requirejs configuration files for a development and production environment, etc.