Spectron: Deprecation Announcement about spectron

[suwi]

"We want to make this transition as painless for you as possible" - transition to, any recommendations?

[christian-bromann]

The WebdriverIO community has build a service for WebdriverIO to seamlessly run Electron UI tests in parallel and with all the features WebdriverIO provides. You can find the instructions here. Thanks to @goosewobbler for making this happen!

[vladimiry]

@suwi transition to "playwright" I guess, see details in #896.

[tanshuai]

"We want to make this transition as painless for you as possible" - transition to, any recommendations?

Check Playwright doc for Electron support.

I tried Playwright by created a minimal Playwright E2E Testing Sample with CI/CT based on GitHub Actions for Electron App and it seems to work better with the latest electron.

[eric-burel]

My feedback:

• Cypress doesn't support Electron anymore, so sadly not an option here. Playwright seems more appropriate, but I've seen test tools come and go in the Electron ecosystem for years...

• Not 100% sure, but "preinstall": "export PLAYWRIGHT_SKIP_BROWSER_DOWNLOAD=1 || set PLAYWRIGHT_SKIP_BROWSER_DOWNLOAD=1" seems to help avoiding to install unnecessary browsers.
  It's a tad difficult to set env variables before the package install because you don't have usual solutions such as cross-env, but this one should be cross-platform. It is based on this Stack Overflow question

• TypeScript works out of the box in Playwright. However at the moment I have trouble with Jest and Playwright typings interacting, when writing tests in TypeScript. I've tried this tip used for Cypress, with no success though: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58999086/cypress-causing-type-errors-in-jest-assertions

Eventually this seems to work, defining a tsconfig.json at the root of my e2e test folder:

{
    "extends": "../../tsconfig.json",
    "compilerOptions": {
    },
    "exclude": [
        "jest"
    ],
    "include": [
        "./**/*.spec.ts"
    ]
}

But to be confirmed, behaviour can be slightly erratic.

• It may be tempting to use Jest as the test runner, however @playwright/test is the recommended way

• The electron.launch command expects your app to be correctly built, you may need to adapt the params (a good practice is to run electron ., which will in turn look for the main file from your package.json).

• electronApp.firstWindow never ends for me, and electronApp.windows is an empty array. I am using Electron v7, maybe it's too old?

So I am almost there with Playwright but I seem to need a more recent version of Electron for "windows" to be detected as expected. Also I couldn't fix the bad interaction with Jest typings, that are global and clashes with expect.

[MasterOdin]

How well does playwright handle different versions of electron? Is there a need for a similar compatibility table as spectron has for different versions of electron?

[eric-burel]

Update: it does work with Electron v9+, it correctly gets the window from "firstWindow", but not for earlier versions. Which I guess is ok these days for people maintaining apps in the long run.

• v7 is almost mandatory anyway, because in introduce "invoke"/"handle" to get a decent API and allow to get rid of remote progressively
• v8, v9 do not have significant breaking change compared to v7, so upgrade path is easy

[eric-burel]

Hi guys, any idea how to grab dialogs with Playwright Electron? Eg when uploading a file? FileChooser doesn't seem to be the most appropriate, see microsoft/playwright#5013, but the dialog doesn't appear as a window object either.

This package seems to address the issue, but I didn't test it yet: https://github.com/wsw0108/playwright-fake-dialog

I suspect also that keypress events are caught by the browser app but not electron menu, it might require some mocking/programmatic trigger as well. We can couple evaluate and getting the app menu to force triggering relevant actions.

Finally, console.log doesn't work in electronApp.evaluate, that's smth to be careful about when debugging.

[Daveiano]

@eric-burel Have you had a look into this comment? microsoft/playwright#8278 (comment)

[eric-burel]

@eric-burel Have you had a look into this comment? microsoft/playwright#8278 (comment)

Yes that's basically the same code. I've managed to make it work with evaluate indeed, that's the goto solution to either mock the main process API or programmatically trigger it