appium-remote-debugger

What is appium-remote-debugger?

The appium-remote-debugger npm package is a tool used for remote debugging of iOS applications. It allows you to interact with and control iOS webviews and Safari instances from a remote environment, which is particularly useful for automated testing scenarios.

What are appium-remote-debugger's main functionalities?

Connecting to a Remote Debugger

This feature allows you to establish a connection to a remote debugger instance. The code sample demonstrates how to create a new RemoteDebugger instance and connect to it using specific parameters like bundleId and platformVersion.

const RemoteDebugger = require('appium-remote-debugger');
const rd = new RemoteDebugger({
  bundleId: 'com.apple.mobilesafari',
  platformVersion: '14.4',
  isSafari: true
});
await rd.connect();

Listing Available Contexts

This feature allows you to list all available contexts (webviews) for a given application. The code sample shows how to select an app and retrieve its contexts.

const contexts = await rd.selectApp('com.apple.mobilesafari');
console.log(contexts);

Executing JavaScript in a Webview

This feature allows you to execute JavaScript code within a webview context. The code sample demonstrates how to execute a simple JavaScript command to get the document title.

const result = await rd.execute('document.title');
console.log(result);

Other packages similar to appium-remote-debugger

webdriverio

WebdriverIO is a popular testing utility for browser and mobile automation. It provides a high-level API to control browsers and mobile applications, similar to appium-remote-debugger, but it supports a wider range of platforms and browsers.

selenium-webdriver

Selenium WebDriver is a widely-used tool for browser automation. It allows you to control web browsers programmatically. While it doesn't specialize in mobile webviews like appium-remote-debugger, it is a robust solution for web automation.

puppeteer

Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. It is primarily used for browser automation and offers functionalities similar to appium-remote-debugger but is limited to Chrome/Chromium.

README

appium-remote-debugger

A Node.js frontend for the Remote Debugger protocol used by Appium to connect to iOS webviews and Safari. Written using ES6+.

Issues for this repo are disabled. Log any issues at the main Appium repo's issue tracker.

Safari's version of the WebKit API

Safari implements a wonky version of the WebKit API. It is not documented. But there is good documentation for the closely related API from Chrome DevTools, to be found here;

API

This is an event emitter, which emits a RemoteDebugger.EVENT_PAGE_CHANGE event when there has been a change to the page. This should be caught and handled as the calling code wishes. It also emits a RemoteDebugger.EVENT_DISCONNECT event when the server disconnects the last application connected.

The steps to using the RemoteDebugger involve instantiating an object, then running connect and selectApp. After this the instance will be listening for events from the server (i.e., the webview or browser).

Selenium "atoms"

The remote debugger uses the standard Selenium Atoms to interact with web pages. These need to be manually updated when necessary. To do so, simply update the branch in Makefile by modifying the SELENIUM_BRANCH variable. Then run npm run build:atoms, test and create a pull request with the resulting changed atoms directory.

Watch

npm run watch

gulp watch

Test

npm test