Nightwatch Functional Browser Test

Hello.

Nightwatch Homepage
Nightwatch GitHub Repo

There are several nightwatch tests already written for Fauxton.

Before running the browser tests, you need to first set it up. Editing your settings.json file (or settings.json.default or whatever you're using) and find the following section near the bottom:

    "nightwatch": {
      "username": "",
      "password": "",
      "launch_url": "",
      "custom_commands_path": "test/nightwatch_tests/custom-commands",
      "globals_path": "test/nightwatch_tests/helpers/helpers.js"
    }

There, add the username, password and launch_url values. The username and password needs to be an admin account already setup on your CouchDB installation. The launch_url should be the base URL of your local installation, minus the “http://” prefix, e.g. localhost:8000 or thomas.dev:8000.

To run the test:

$ npm install
$ grunt nightwatch

You can run individual single tests by running

$ grunt nightwatch --file="createsDatabase"

if you want to run the testfile createsDatabase.js.

Writing Tests

You can contribute by writing tests for Fauxton as well.

Please take a look at the existing examples in the app/addons/documents/tests or app/addons/databases/tests folders.

Below are a few caveats to writing tests.

  1. When you write a new test, if the component you are testing doesn't have any nightwatch tests already, you will need to create a folder for it, and add its file path to the list of test folders in tests/nightwatch_test/nightwatch.json.
  2. Before each test is run, a database called‘fauxton-selenium-test’ is created, then deleted after each test.
  3. Use .verify() instead of .assert() in your tests. This will allow the tests to continue, even if the browser has failed, and will not exit or skip subsequent tests.
  4. .waitForElementNotPresent(), .waitForElementNotVisible(), .waitForElementPresent(), .waitForElementVisible(), will exit testing by default if the Element is not found. There is a third argument, ‘abortOnFailure’, if you set this to ‘false’, the rest of the tests will continue even if this assertion fails.

there is a custom function called clickWhenReady which will wait for an element to visible, then click on it

  1. Sometimes .click() doesn‘t work reliably (most likely if the element you are clicking on doesn’t have an individual ID selector). You can use jquery to simulate a click by using .execute('$("#CSS Selector.HERE").click();').
  2. The function .pause(time) is sometimes necessary, although we have tried to avoid excessive use of a hard coded pausing. Instead try and make use of the .waitForElement functions instead of .pause(time).

Nightwatch Files in Fauxton

There are several Nightwatch related files spread out in the couchdb-fauxton folder.

  1. Individual browser tests are kept in

     couchdb-fauxton/app/addons/[component]/test/nightwatch

    where [component] is the area you are testing. For example, there is an individual test located in:

     couchdb-fauxton/app/addons/documents/tests/nightwatch/createsDocument.js

  2. Custom Commands, Global helper functions, and the Configuration are kept in

     couchdb-fauxton/tests/nightwatch_tests

    The configuration file is nightwatch.json. Please note that this file is auto-generated by grunt every time you run the nightwatch task. It examines the content of your settings.json file to figure out what tests to run. Global helper functions are in helpers/helpers.js.
    Custom commands are custom-commands/functionName.js.

    • The custom command name is the name of the file itself, and it needs to follow either the loginToGUI.js pattern, or the createDatabase.js pattern (for async commands).

    Selenium related files are kept in the selenium folder

  3. Node

    The folder node_modules/nightwatch contains the program files. You will not need to edit these files, but there are some provided examples in there to look at.