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+.

Safari's version of the WebKit API

Safari implements a wonky version of the WebKit API. It is not documented. The JSON version of the protocol is documented in the WebKit source code, in Source/JavaScriptCore/inspector/protocol/.

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 the scripts/common.js, by modifying the SELENIUM_BRANCH constant at the top of the file. Then run npm run build:atoms, test and create a pull request with the resulting changed atoms directory.

Note that to build the atoms it is required that you have the bazel tool installed. Selenium will also require that it be installed at a particular version relative to the version of Selenium that has been checked out by our build script. It is most convenient simply to install bazelisk and have it available on your PATH.

One caveat is that there are some changes that are needed for Appium, that are not yet in the Selenium codebase. See the atoms notes for details.

Test

npm test
npm e2e-test