Angular 2 Unit Tests: Cannot find name 'describe'

You need to install typings for jasmine. Assuming you are on a relatively recent version of typescript 2 you should be able to do:

npm install --save-dev @types/jasmine

With [email protected] or later you can install types with:

npm install -D @types/jasmine

Then import the types automatically using the types option in tsconfig.json:

"types": ["jasmine"],

This solution does not require import {} from 'jasmine'; in each spec file.

I hope you've installed -

npm install --save-dev @types/jasmine

Then put following import at the top of the hero.spec.ts file -

import 'jasmine';

It should solve the problem.

npm install @types/jasmine

As mentioned in some comments the "types": ["jasmine"] is not needed anymore, all @types packages are automatically included in compilation (since v2.1 I think).

In my opinion the easiest solution is to exclude the test files in your tsconfig.json like:

"exclude": [
    "node_modules",
    "**/*.spec.ts"
]

This works for me.

Further information in the official tsconfig docs.