testcafe-browser-provider-nightmare

This is the nightmare browser provider plugin for TestCafe. It provides an electron-based, headless Chrome browser environment for running your tests in. It is popular for being more solid and reliable than phantomjs, while at the same time giving better performance.

Please note that the current implementation of electron and the underlying Chromium requires XVFB to be installed on Linux host systems, otherwise nightmare will not work (see this issue for details). This will hopefully change soon as a headless mode already landed in Chromium.

Install

npm install testcafe-browser-provider-nightmare

Usage

When you run tests from the command line, use the provider name when specifying browsers:

testcafe nightmare 'path/to/test/file.js'

When you use API, pass the provider name to the browsers() method:

testCafe
    .createRunner()
    .src('path/to/test/file.js')
    .browsers('nightmare')
    .run();

Debugging

It is incredibly useful to be able to see what is happening inside your browser. Nightmare's big advantage over phantomjs is that you can easily enable a visual output to aid in local debugging. The nightmare provider uses the fairly popular debug library (as does nightmare itself), so you can enable debugging with the following commandline:

DEBUG=* testcafe nightmare 'path/to/test/file.js'

This activates the show and openDevTools options for nightmare, so the browser window becomes visible throughout the test run and the dev tools are already opened. Well, it also enables debug output for any other module using debug, so you will get a lot debug messages in the console. I'm still figuring out how to properly use filtering in that case ;) ..

NOTE: When running nightmare from a gulp task (e.g. using child_process.spawn) you can use process.env.DEBUG = '*'; to set the debug flag in the environment, before spawning the testcafe process. Another option is to already set the variable when executing your test runner, e.g. gulp:

DEBUG=* gulp test

Author

Rico Pfaus