Appium — a test tool for apps: Introduction and Startup

Today I’m gonna introduce a test tool to you.

Appium

Appium is an open source test automation framework for use with native, hybrid and mobile web apps. It drives iOS, Android, and Windows apps using the WebDriver protocol.

Download

There are two ways to download the server side of Appium:

1. Directlydownload:Github

2. Use npm

npm install -g appium

Note

Download from Appium Github page might be blook by macos sometimes. Not sure why, but at that time try use NPM . Installation via NPM

If you want to run Appium via an npm install, hack with Appium, or contribute to Appium, you will need Node.js and NPM.

Appium Server

Launch

• Through download from Github: Install and click the application.
• Through NPM

After launch Appium, you would see the home page.

Appium Clients

Use Homebrew.

1. Homebrew

/bin/bash -c “$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

2. brew install python3

Appium Clients List

Here will use Python.

Github python-client: python-client
The official website provides three ways to install client. Here I use the second way by pip .

Instead of pip install Appium-Python-Client , I need to use sudo pip install Appium-Python-Client , otherwise it would cause the error of Permission denied .

pip3 install -U pytest

Set Appium config

Example:

1. The app path should end with .app

• The xxx.app file could be found here: /Users/irons/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/…

There are two xxx.app files. Make sure choose the correct one:

../Debug-iphoneos/xxx.app : For real device

../Debug-iphonesimulator/xxx.app : For simulator

Running First Test

Now, we’re gonna run our first test.

Here are some errors that I was met.

1. NameError: name 'PATH' is not defined

• Solution 1: Add a missing function PATH.
• Solution 2: Using direct path. Like ‘/Users/irons/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/xxx/Build/Products/Debug-iphonesimulator/xxx.app’ .

2. error: Could not create simulator with name

• Either using iPhone Simulator or the exactly the same device name in your simulators list like iPhone 8.

3. error: Bad app

• Invalid app.

4. error: Simulator architecture is unsupported …

• Invalid architecture.

5. selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: An element could not be located on the page using the given search parameters.

• If not find the accessibility id .

First Test Case

Skip Permissions

The permissions requestion alert window would jump out every time you run the tests. Here is a way that can skip it. Using AppleSimulatorUtils.

AppleSimulatorUtils

Install:

brew tap wix/brew
  brew install applesimutils

Add the permissions you want to avoid in config:

permissions=’{\”your.app.bundle.id\”:{\”camera\”:\”YES\”,\”medialibrary\”:\”YES\”,\”microphone\”:\”YES\”,\”notifications\”:\”YES\”,\”photos\”:\”YES\”}}’

The config would look like:

desired_caps = dict(
platformName=’iOS’,
platformVersion=’14.4',
automationName=’xcuitest’,
deviceName=’iPhone 8 Plus’,
app=PATH(Your_App_Path), // should end with .app permissions=’{\”your.app.bundle.id\”:{\”location\”:\”inuse\”}}’)

ref: appium-clients Debug

Debugging

WebDriverAgent is tricky. Appium uses the library to run tests against iOS.

Here I’d like to leave how to debug WebDriverAgent using Appium. You can set break points in arbitrary lines on WebDriverAgent via Xcode following below.

WebDriverAgent

git clone https://github.com/appium/WebDriverAgent.git 
cd WebDriverAgent
./Scripts/bootstrap.sh

1. Open WebDriverAgent.xcodeproj with Xcode Open Edit Scheme
2. Set 8100 as the port
3. Run test
4. Then you can see below logs in console: ServerURLHere->http://172.254.99.34:8100<-ServerURLHere
5. Remeber the ip: http://172.254.99.34:8100
   Set webDriverAgentUrl=’http://172.254.99.34:8100' in config.
6. Finally, we can use WDA with breaking point like iOS development.

ref: set-break-points-webdriveragent

Report

There are some ways to generate a report, here I suggests two common ways:

1. Using pytest-html

ScreenShot:

Install and usage:

pip install pytest-html
pytest FitstTest.py — html report/report.html

2. Using allure

ScreenShot:

Install and usage:

1. pip install allure-pytest — Install a pytest plug of allure.
2. brew install allure — Install allure command-line tool.
3. pytest FitstTest.py — alluredir allure-results — Run test and save the result
4. to specified folder. allure serve allure-results/ — Open browser to show
5. the report immediately.
6. allure generate allure-results -o allure-report — Generate report as a html file.
7. Allure: Target directory /Users/irons/Documents/Appium/FitstTest/allure-report for the report is already in use, add a ‘ — clean’ option to overwrite — allure generate allure-results -o allure-report — clean — Need to
8. clean before add a new report.

Problem of Allure

The report that genereate by Allure cannot be read as a html file, this problem is related to default Webkit security settings which forbid doing Ajax requests on the local filesystem. You have at least two possible solutions:

1. Serveindex.htmlwithsomeweb-serverlikeNginxorApache.Thiswillemulateremotewebsiteandthustrickyourbrowser.With Allure CLI 2.0+ this can be done using the following command: allure open allure-report/

Use — allow-file-access-from-files Chrome flag. See details in this question.

This one is DANDEGEROUS.