With the Global Setup/Teardown and Async Test Environment APIs, Jest can work smoothly with puppeteer.

Use Puppeteer Preset

Jest Puppeteer provides all required configuration to run your tests using Puppeteer.

1. First install jest-puppeteer

yarn add --dev jest-puppeteer

2. Specify preset in your Jest configuration:

{
  "preset": "jest-puppeteer"
}

See documentation.

Custom example

The basic idea is to:

1. launch & file the websocket endpoint of puppeteer with Global Setup
2. connect to puppeteer from each Test Environment
3. close puppeteer with Global Teardown

Here's an example of the GlobalSetup script

// setup.js
module.exports = async function() {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
  // store the browser instance so we can teardown it later
  // this global is only available in the teardown but not in TestEnvironments
  global.__BROWSER_GLOBAL__ = browser;

  // use the file system to expose the wsEndpoint for TestEnvironments
  mkdirp.sync(DIR);
  fs.writeFileSync(path.join(DIR, 'wsEndpoint'), browser.wsEndpoint());
};

Then we need a custom Test Environment for puppeteer

// puppeteer_environment.js
class PuppeteerEnvironment extends NodeEnvironment {
  constructor(config) {
    super(config);
  }

  async setup() {
    await super.setup();
    // get the wsEndpoint
    const wsEndpoint = fs.readFileSync(path.join(DIR, 'wsEndpoint'), 'utf8');
    if (!wsEndpoint) {
      throw new Error('wsEndpoint not found');
    }

    // connect to puppeteer
    this.global.__BROWSER__ = await puppeteer.connect({
      browserWSEndpoint: wsEndpoint,
    });
  }

  async teardown() {
    await super.teardown();
  }

  runScript(script) {
    return super.runScript(script);
  }
}

Finally we can close the puppeteer instance and clean-up the file

// teardown.js
module.exports = async function() {
  // close the browser instance
  await global.__BROWSER_GLOBAL__.close();

  // clean-up the wsEndpoint file
  rimraf.sync(DIR);
};

With all the things set up, we can now write our tests like this:

// test.js
describe(
  '/ (Home Page)',
  () => {
    let page;
    beforeAll(async () => {
      page = await global.__BROWSER__.newPage();
      await page.goto('https://google.com');
    }, timeout);

    it('should load without error', async () => {
      const text = await page.evaluate(() => document.body.textContent);
      expect(text).toContain('google');
    });
  },
  timeout,
);

Here's the code of full working example.