Automate your Appium setup

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 and gives you the ability to automate any mobile app from any language and any test framework.

Appium released its first major version almost 7 years ago. Since then, Appium has rolled out a lot of new features and its automation backend architecture has evolved quite a lot.

That said, getting started with implementing automated tests and executing them using Appium the 1st time can be a daunting experience.

There are a lot of dependencies that need to be set up — node, android-command-line tools, appium, etc.

Appium Setup Scripts

In order to make this task easier, and avoid having to do this manually, one at a time, I have written a script that will help set the Appium-Android environment automatically for you. The script is available for Mac OSX and Ubuntu and will set up the latest available version of the dependencies & appium itself.

You can find the scripts here:

MacOSX: setup_mac.sh

Ubuntu: setup_linux.sh

The mentioned setup scripts install all dependencies required for implementing / running tests on Android devices. To do the setup for iOS devices, run appium-doctor and see the list of dependencies that are missing, and install the same.

To ensure the setup is working properly, you can clone / download this sample repository ( https://github.com/anandbagmar/AppiumJavaSample) which has 2 tests that can be executed to verify the setup.

Refer to the README file for specifics of the prerequisites to do the setup and also for running the tests.

To get full value of your functional test automation, add the power of Visual AI to your tests. You can refer to the relevant tutorial for adding Applitools Visual AI to your Appium tests from here.

Summary

Automate your Android and Appium test execution environment setup using an automated script on MacOSX ( setup_mac.sh) and Ubuntu ( setup_linux.sh).

Originally published at https://applitools.com on February 19, 2021.