@wdio/appium-service

WebdriverIO Appium Service

Handling the Appium server is out of the scope of the actual WebdriverIO project. This service helps you to run the Appium server seamlessly when running tests with the WDIO testrunner. It starts the Appium Server in a child process.

Installation

The easiest way is to keep @wdio/appium-service as a devDependency in your package.json, via:

npm install @wdio/appium-service --save-dev

Instructions on how to install WebdriverIO can be found here.

Configuration

In order to use the service you need to add appium to your service array:

// wdio.conf.js
export const config = {
    // ...
    port: 4723, // default appium port
    services: ['appium'],
    // ...
};

Options

The following options can be added to the wdio.conf.js file. To define options for the service you need to add the service to the services list in the following way:

// wdio.conf.js
export const config = {
    // ...
    port: 4723, // default appium port
    services: [
        ['appium', {
            // Appium service options here
            // ...
        }]
    ],
    // ...
};

logPath

The path where all logs from the Appium server should be stored.

Type: String

Example:

export const config = {
    // ...
    services: [
        ['appium', {
            logPath : './'
        }]
    ],
    // ...
}

command

To use your installation of Appium, e.g. globally installed, specify the command which should be started.

Type: String

Example:

export const config = {
    // ...
    services: [
        ['appium', {
            command : 'appium'
        }]
    ],
    // ...
}

args

Map of arguments for the Appium server, passed directly to appium.

See the documentation for possible arguments. The arguments are supplied in lower camel case. For instance, debugLogSpacing: true transforms into --debug-log-spacing, or they can be supplied as outlined in the Appium documentation.

Type: Object

Default: {}

Example:

export const config = {
    // ...
    services: [
        ['appium', {
            args: {
                // ...
                debugLogSpacing: true,
                platformName: 'iOS'
                // ...
            }
        }]
    ],
    // ...
}

Note: The utilization of aliases is discouraged and unsupported. Instead, please use the full property name in lower camel case.

For more information on WebdriverIO see the homepage.

Changelog

v9.20.0 (2025-09-27)

:rocket: New Feature

• wdio-allure-reporter
  • #14719 Update wdio-allure-reporter for Allure 3 (@todti)

:bug: Bug Fix

• webdriver
  • #14760 fix(webdriver): Fix no retrying requests when unexpected token on responses occurs (like on HTML responses) (@Nyaran)
• wdio-cucumber-framework
  • #14763 feat(cucumber): Fix skipping tests with skip tag using complex regular expressions (@Nyaran)
• wdio-allure-reporter
  • #14723 fix(@wdio/allure-reporter): Encode HTML entities (@sventschui)
• webdriverio
  • #14714 fix(attach-params): user options should override detectBackend (@NaamuKim)
• wdio-utils
  • #14750 feat(utils): Fix reduce function to use the initial value parameter (@Nyaran)

:nail_care: Polish

• wdio-browserstack-service
  • #14783 Exhaustive logging for better capability flow debug (@pranay-v29)
  • #14781 SDK-4104 Updated the build url format for azure pipelines (@pranay-v29)
• wdio-cli, wdio-config
  • #14664 tsConfigPath in wdio.conf (@sh41)
• webdriverio
  • #14744 fix: polish waitForClickable (@wswebcreation)
  • #14745 fix: polish isStable commands (@wswebcreation)
• wdio-browserstack-service, wdio-local-runner
  • #14734 Support added for change in product name:- Observability -> Test Reporting and Analytics v9 (@Tanmay-Bstack)

:memo: Documentation

• Other
  • #14786 Updated refs due to changes in the example-recipes repo (@fpereira1)
  • #14787 Update docs on selector to warn that aria/ selectors can be slow (@fpereira1)
  • #14776 corrected typo in the index page (@alphabetkrish)
• wdio-junit-reporter
  • #14735 docs(@wdio/junit-reporter): update readme (@eglitise)

:house: Internal

• #14748 chore(.nvmrc) upgrade node version to fix continuous release (@NaamuKim)

Committers: 15

• Alex (@todti)
• David Prevost (@dprevost-LMI)
• Edgars Eglītis (@eglitise)
• Erkan Erol (@erkanerol)
• Filype (@fpereira1)
• Luis Zurro (@Nyaran)
• Luke (@NaamuKim)
• Nathan Zhao (@phantomwolf)
• Pranay Varma (@pranay-v29)
• Steve Hall (@sh41)
• Sven (@sventschui)
• Ulises Gascón (@UlisesGascon)
• Wim Selles (@wswebcreation)
• @Tanmay-Bstack
• @alphabetkrish

Similar packages

Other packages similar to @wdio/appium-service

appium

Appium is an open-source tool for automating mobile applications. It allows you to write tests for multiple platforms (iOS, Android) using the same API. Compared to @wdio/appium-service, Appium is the core server that @wdio/appium-service interacts with to manage mobile testing.

wdio-selenium-standalone-service

The wdio-selenium-standalone-service is a WebdriverIO service that helps you run a standalone Selenium server seamlessly when running your WebdriverIO tests. It is similar to @wdio/appium-service but is used for web browser automation instead of mobile app automation.

webdriverio

WebdriverIO is a popular testing framework for Node.js that allows you to write and run tests for web and mobile applications. While WebdriverIO provides the framework and API for writing tests, @wdio/appium-service specifically helps manage the Appium server for mobile testing.