How to increase Jest timeout value for tests

Introduction

Oftentimes while using jest, some testcases bail with: Exceeded timeout of 5000 ms for a test. An approach is to increase the timeout of the testcase or at test level or at config level(for all tests).

1. Set test timeout at testcase level

To increase test timeout at the testcase level, pass the timeout value in miliseconds to it as the last argument, exhibit: test(name, fn, timeout), test (aliased as it) is a global meaning there’s no need to implicitly import from jest package.

More on Jest Globals here

// inside the test file
describe('Base API tests', () => {
  const bridgeAPI = new BridgeApi({})
  beforeAll(() => {
    // some teardown and setup
  })

  it('fetches current server Health', async() => {
    const health = await bridgeAPI.getServerHealth()
    expect(health).toBe("ok")
  })
}, 8000) // we pass a timeout value of 8000 ms to this test case

2. Setting timeout at Test level

Test timeout at test level(for all testcases in a given file). This can be done by calling jest.setTimeout on the jest object at the top of the test file.

// inside the test file
const TIME_IN_SECONDS = 8 * 1000
jest.setTimeout(TIME_IN_SECONDS)

describe('Base API tests', () => {
  const bridgeAPI = new BridgeApi({})
  beforeAll(() => {
    // some teardown and setup
  })

  it('fetches current server Health', async() => {
    const health = await bridgeAPI.getServerHealth()
    expect(health).toBe("ok")
  })

}) // we pass a timeout value of 8000 ms to this test case

Set the default timeout interval (in milliseconds) for all tests and before/after hooks in the test file. This only affects the test file from which this function is called. The default timeout interval is 5 seconds if this method is not called. The jest object

3. Setting timeout at config level- affects all the tests

This can be set in testTimeout property of test config object in jest.config.js on jest@29.7 onwards.

import type {Config} from 'jest';

const config: Config = {
  testTimeout: 8 * 1000 // 8seconds
};

export default config;

All tests will timeout after 8seconds including teardown hooks(afterAll etc)