Injecting a mock into an AngularJS service

You can inject mocks into your service by using $provide.

If you have the following service with a dependency that has a method called getSomething:

angular.module('myModule', [])
  .factory('myService', function (myDependency) {
        return {
            useDependency: function () {
                return myDependency.getSomething();
            }
        };
  });

You can inject a mock version of myDependency as follows:

describe('Service: myService', function () {

  var mockDependency;

  beforeEach(module('myModule'));

  beforeEach(function () {

      mockDependency = {
          getSomething: function () {
              return 'mockReturnValue';
          }
      };

      module(function ($provide) {
          $provide.value('myDependency', mockDependency);
      });

  });

  it('should return value from mock dependency', inject(function (myService) {
      expect(myService.useDependency()).toBe('mockReturnValue');
  }));

});

Note that because of the call to $provide.value you don’t actually need to explicitly inject myDependency anywhere. It happens under the hood during the injection of myService. When setting up mockDependency here, it could just as easily be a spy.

Thanks to loyalBrown for the link to that great video.