Why do "npm test" and "mocha test" both do the same thing? Is there a difference?

npm looks in the package.json file for instructions on what tasks it should do when you type npm <command>. It can do a lot of tasks (as in the scripts link provided by Matthew).

In this course we used npm init to create the package.json file and npm install --save-dev mocha chai to install those two as development dependencies. Because npm is pretty smart it automatically setup mocha as the program that is in charge of the npm task that runs tests.

It might have been more informative for Guil to have demonstrated that we could also manually edit our package.json file to instruct npm to use mocha when performing the test task with npm test.

npm test is a shortened version of npm run test; npm is running the test command as defined in the package.json configuration file.

So to answer your question, no it's not the same thing. npm isn't doing any testing on it's own; it is merely running the mocha command for you.

What i got from the course was that npm test is the built-in task npm runs to test your script. npm test mocha just test the mocha script. Here is a link for more info. https://docs.npmjs.com/misc/scripts

If you're working locally rather than in workspaces, and you've never used mocha before, you'll notice beginning in video 3 that your computer has no mocha command. The way Guil runs it initially only works if mocha is installed globally on your computer, but when you add "test": "mocha" to your package.json scripts, npm can use your project installation of mocha to run the tests for you. Some more info in this thread