how to fix 404 warnings for images during karma unit testing

The confusing piece of the puzzle for me was the 'base' virtual folder. If you don't know that needs to be included in the asset paths of your fixtures you will find it hard to debug.

As-per the configuration documentation

By default all assets are served at http://localhost:[PORT]/base/

Note: this may not be true for other versions - I'm on 0.12.14 and it worked for me but the 0.10 docs dont mention it.

After specifying the files pattern:

{ pattern: 'Test/images/*.gif', watched: false, included: false, served: true, nocache: false },

I could use this in my fixture:

<img src="base/Test/images/myimage.gif" />

And I didn't need the proxy at that point.

That is because you need to configurate karma to load then serve them when requested ;)

In your karma.conf.js file you should already have defined files and/or patterns like :

// list of files / patterns to load in the browser
files : [
  {pattern: 'app/lib/angular.js', watched: true, included: true, served: true},
  {pattern: 'app/lib/angular-*.js', watched: true, included: true, served: true},
  {pattern: 'app/lib/**/*.js', watched: true, included: true, served: true},
  {pattern: 'app/js/**/*.js', watched: true, included: true, served: true},
  // add the line below with the correct path pattern for your case
  {pattern: 'path/to/**/*.png', watched: false, included: false, served: true},
  // important: notice that "included" must be false to avoid errors
  // otherwise Karma will include them as scripts
  {pattern: 'test/lib/**/*.js', watched: true, included: true, served: true},
  {pattern: 'test/unit/**/*.js', watched: true, included: true, served: true},
],

// list of files to exclude
exclude: [

],

// ...

You can have a look here for more info :)

EDIT : If you use a nodejs web-server to run your app, you can add this to karma.conf.js :

proxies: {
  '/path/to/img/': 'http://localhost:8000/path/to/img/'
},

EDIT2 : If you don't use or want to use another server you can define a local proxy but as Karma doesn't provide access to port in use, dynamically, if karma starts on another port than 9876 (default), you will still get those annoying 404...

proxies =  {
  '/images/': '/base/images/'
};

Related issue : https://github.com/karma-runner/karma/issues/872