Angular 6 Unit Tests: An error was thrown in afterAll\nReferenceError: Can’t find variable: $ thrown

My issue was that I had a race condition in my tests due to a very stupid way of setting up my tests, but I wanted to document it here anyways because I struggled to find the answer to my issue on the internet.

What I had somehow done was to declare two beforeEach functions to setup my test, and one of the two was asynchronous, so I had a race condition where sometimes they ran out of order and failed.

Here is how my test looked:

beforeEach(async(() => {
    TestBed.configureTestingModule({
      declarations: [ HomeComponent ]
    })
    .compileComponents();
  }));

  beforeEach(() => {
    fixture = TestBed.createComponent(HomeComponent);
    component = fixture.componentInstance;
    fixture.detectChanges();
  });

So to resolve this I put all the setup into one, synchronous beforeEach.

  beforeEach(() => {
    TestBed.configureTestingModule({
      declarations: [HomeComponent]
    }).compileComponents();
    fixture = TestBed.createComponent(HomeComponent);
    component = fixture.componentInstance;
    fixture.detectChanges();
  });

I wasted too much time trying to figure this out, so I’m putting it here to save someone else.