Jest fails with "Unexpected token *" on import statement

Some react-native libraries ship uncompiled ES6 code.

ES6 code needs to be compiled before it can be run by Jest.

The Jest doc about Testing React Native Apps includes a section about compiling dependencies that don't ship pre-compiled code.

You will need to tell Jest to compile react-navigation-tabs by whitelisting it in the transformIgnorePatterns option in your Jest config.

Example:

Changing the jest.config.js file into something like below, fixed the issue mentioned in OP.

But the react-native-reanimated module (which requires native integration) needs further work, and we should "Mock" modules with such native requirements (as described in another post).

module.exports = {
  preset: 'react-native',
  moduleFileExtensions: ['ts', 'tsx', 'js', 'jsx', 'json', 'node'],
  transformIgnorePatterns: [
    "node_modules/(?!(react-native"
      + "|react-navigation-tabs"
      + "|react-native-splash-screen"
      + "|react-native-screens"
      + "|react-native-reanimated"
    + ")/)",
  ],
}

Note that the transformIgnorePatterns option (which is an array of Regular-Expressions) is originally meant to exclude files from being compiled, but using (?!(some-dir-name|another-name)) pattern, with the "(?!...)" negative look-ahead, we do tell Jest to exclude anything in node_modules directory, except the names that we did specify.

If you're using not only React Native but also Expo, I fixed the same issue but for Expo components by following the official guide, Testing with Jest. Specifically, install via package manager the jest preset jest-expo, and then update my package.json as they describe:

"jest": {
  "preset": "jest-expo",
  "transformIgnorePatterns": [
    "node_modules/(?!(jest-)?react-native|react-clone-referenced-element|@react-native-community|expo(nent)?|@expo(nent)?/.*|react-navigation|@react-navigation/.*|@unimodules/.*|unimodules|sentry-expo|native-base|@sentry/.*)"
  ]
}

I also needed to add to the end of the transformIgnorePatterns regexp string an exception for |.*font.* as the Expo Fonts were what were giving me trouble. Probably I could have made it a bit more specific, but I hate regex, and this worked so I left it there!

As it has been said, some modules needs to be transpiled, & some don't. Here is a regex I use that work in a lot of projects

  "jest": {
    "preset": "react-native",
    "transformIgnorePatterns": [
      "node_modules/(?!(jest-)?react-native|react-(native|universal|navigation)-(.*)|@react-native-community/(.*)|@react-navigation/(.*)|bs-platform|(@[a-zA-Z]+/)?(bs|reason|rescript)-(.*)+)"
    ]
  }

It's working for most common react native thing, & include also a specific package (here bs-platform) as an example, when isn't captured by previous patterns.

I had a similar issue on a React + Typescript app.

The first mistake I made was to define the jest.config.js as jest.config.ts

Running on Node v12.latest

Then the configuration that worked for me were the following:

// jest.config.js

module.exports = {
  preset: "ts-jest",
  testEnvironment: "node",
  roots: ["./src"],
  transform: { "\\.ts$": ["ts-jest"] },
  testRegex: "(/__tests__/.*|(\\.|/)(test|spec))\\.tsx?$",
  moduleFileExtensions: ["ts", "tsx", "js", "jsx", "json", "node"],
  globals: {
    "ts-jest": {
      tsConfig: {
        // allow js in typescript
        allowJs: true,
      },
    },
  },
};

// tsconfig.json
{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "target": "es5",
    "lib": ["dom", "dom.iterable", "esnext"],
    "allowJs": true,
    "skipLibCheck": true,
    "esModuleInterop": true,
    "allowSyntheticDefaultImports": true,
    "strict": true,
    "forceConsistentCasingInFileNames": true,
    "module": "esnext",
    "moduleResolution": "node",
    "resolveJsonModule": true,
    "isolatedModules": true,
    "noEmit": true,
    "jsx": "react",
    "baseUrl": "."
  },
  "include": ["src"],
  "exclude": ["node_modules", "**/*.spec.ts"]
}

// package.json
"devDependencies": {
    "@types/jest": "^26.0.5",
    "jest": "^26.1.0",
    "ts-jest": "^26.1.3"
}