Mocking window.location in Jest

It’s sometimes necessary to mock window.location in Jest tests. This could because you want to know when window.location.reload() is called, or one of its other methods (.assign(), .replace()).

Here’s some code to achieve this:

const savedLocation = window.location;

beforeEach(() => {
  delete window.location;
  window.location = Object.assign(new URL("https://example.org"), {
    ancestorOrigins: "",
    assign: jest.fn(),
    reload: jest.fn(),
    replace: jest.fn()
  });
});
afterEach(() => {
  window.location = savedLocation;
});
You could then detect whether your implementation called .reload():

it("reloads the page", () => {
  expect(window.location.reload).toHaveBeenCalled();
});

If you wanted to reuse this in multiple tests, you could wrap this in a reusable function:

function mockWindowLocation() {
  const savedLocation = window.location;

  beforeEach(() => {
    delete window.location;
    window.location = Object.assign(new URL("https://example.org"), {
      ancestorOrigins: "",
      assign: jest.fn(),
      reload: jest.fn(),
      replace: jest.fn()
    });
  });
  afterEach(() => {
    window.location = savedLocation;
  });
}