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Getting Started

This doc will get you up and running with a simple Appium test and introduce you to some basic Appium ideas. For a fuller introduction to Appium concepts, please check out the conceptual introduction.

Installing Appium

Appium can be installed in one of two ways: via NPM or by downloading Appium Desktop, which is a graphical, desktop-based way to launch the Appium server.

Installation via NPM

If you want to run Appium via an npm install, hack with Appium, or contribute to Appium, you will need Node.js and NPM (use nvm, n, or brew install node to install Node.js. Make sure you have not installed Node or Appium with sudo, otherwise you'll run into problems). We recommend the latest stable version, though Appium supports Node 6+.

The actual installation is as simple as:

npm install -g appium

Installation via Desktop App Download

Simply download the latest version of Appium Desktop from the releases page.

Driver-Specific Setup

You probably want to use Appium to automate something specific, like an iOS or Android application. Support for the automation of a particular platform is provided by an Appium "driver". There are a number of such drivers that give you access to different kinds of automation technologies, and each come with their own particular setup requirements. Most of these requirements are the same requirements as for app development on a specific platform. For example, to automate Android applications using one of our Android drivers, you'll need the Android SDK configured on your system.

At some point, make sure you review the driver documentation for the platform you want to automate, so your system is set up correctly:

Verifying the Installation

To verify that all of Appium's dependencies are met you can use appium-doctor. Install it with npm install -g appium-doctor, then run the appium-doctor command, supplying the --ios or --android flags to verify that all of the dependencies are set up correctly.

Appium Clients

When all is said and done, Appium is just an HTTP server. It sits and waits for connections from a client, which then instructs Appium what kind of session to start and what kind of automation behaviors to enact once a session is started. This means that you never use Appium just by itself. You always have to use it with a client library of some kind (or, if you're adventurous, cURL!).

Luckily, Appium speaks the same protocol as Selenium, called the WebDriver Protocol. You can do a lot of things with Appium just by using one of the standard Selenium clients. You may even have one of these on your system already. It's enough to get started, especially if you're using Appium for the purpose of testing web browsers on mobile platforms.

Appium can do things that Selenium can't, though, just like mobile devices can do things that web browsers can't. For that reason, we have a set of Appium clients in a variety of programming languages, that extend the regular old Selenium clients with additional functionality. You can see the list of clients and links to download instructions at the Appium clients list.

Before moving forward, make sure you have a client downloaded in your favorite language and ready to go.

Starting Appium

Now we can kick up an Appium server, either by running it from the command line like so (assuming the NPM install was successful):

appium

Or by clicking the huge Start Server button inside of Appium Desktop.

Appium will now show you a little welcome message showing the version of Appium you're running and what port it's listening on (the default is 4723). This port information is vital since you will have to direct your test client to make sure to connect to Appium on this port. If you want to change, the port, you can do so by using the -p flag when starting Appium (be sure to check out the full list of server parameters).

Running Your First Test

In this section we'll run a basic "Hello World" Android test. We've chosen Android because it's available on all platforms. We'll be using the UiAutomator2 Driver so ensure you've read through that doc and gotten your system set up appropriately. We'll also be using JavaScript as the language so that we don't have to deal with additional dependencies.

(Chances are, you'll eventually want to automate something other than Android using something other than JavaScript. In that case, check out our sample-code repository, which has code samples for many languages and platforms.)

Prerequisites

  • We'll assume you have an Android 8.0 emulator configured and running (the example will work on lower versions, just fix the version numbers accordingly)
  • We'll assume you have this test APK downloaded and available on your local filesystem

Setting up the Appium Client

For this example, we'll use Webdriver.io as our Appium client. Create a directory for this example, then run:

npm install webdriverio

Session Initialization

Now we can create our test file (name it whatever you like) and initialize the client object:

// javascript
const wdio = require('webdriverio');

The next thing we need to do is to start an Appium session. We do this by defining a set of server options and Desired Capabilities, and calling wdio.remote() with them. Desired Capabilities are just a set of keys and values that get sent to the Appium server during session initialization, that tell Appium what kind of thing we want to automate. The minimum set of required capabilities for any Appium driver should include:

  • platformName: the name of the platform to automate
  • platformVersion: the version of the platform to automate
  • deviceName: the kind of device to automate
  • app: the path to the app you want to automate (but use the browserName capability instead in the case of automating a web browser)
  • automationName: the name of the driver you wish to use

For more information on Desired Capabilities and for a list of all the Capabilities you can use in Appium, see our Capabilities doc.

So here is how we begin to construct a session in our test file:

// javascript
const opts = {
  port: 4723,
  desiredCapabilities: {
    platformName: "Android",
    platformVersion: "8.0",
    deviceName: "Android Emulator",
    app: "/path/to/the/downloaded/ApiDemos.apk",
    automationName: "UiAutomator2"
  }
};

const client = wdio.remote(opts);

Running Test Commands

You can see that we've specified our Appium port and also constructed our Desired Capabilities to match our requirements (but don't forget to replace the path with the actual download path for your system). We've registered this fact with webdriverio and now have a client object which will represent the connection to the Appium server. From here, we can go ahead and start the session, perform some test commands, and end the session. In our case, we will simply tap into a few menus and then back out the way we came before ending the session:

// javascript
client
  .init()
  .click("~App")
  .click("~Alert Dialogs")
  .back()
  .back()
  .end();

What's going on here is that after creating a session and launching our app, we're instructing Appium to find an element in the app hierarchy and click on it. Specifically, webdriverio has a convention where the ~ prefix means to find an element by its "accessbility id", which in the case of Android means an element's "content description". So we find and tap on these elements in order to navigate through the app's menu system. Then we can use the back() method to trigger the Android "back" behavior and get back to where we started before ending the session.

Putting it all together, the file should look like:

// javascript

const wdio = require('webdriverio');

const opts = {
  port: 4723,
  desiredCapabilities: {
    platformName: "Android",
    platformVersion: "8.0",
    deviceName: "Android Emulator",
    app: "/path/to/the/downloaded/ApiDemos.apk",
    automationName: "UiAutomator2"
  }
};

const client = wdio.remote(opts);

client
  .init()
  .click("~App")
  .click("~Alert Dialogs")
  .back()
  .back()
  .end();

You can try and run this test on your own. Simply save it and execute it using node. If everything is set up correctly, you'll see Appium begin spitting out lots of logs and eventually the app will pop up on the screen and start behaving as if an invisible user were tapping on it!

What's Next

We've only scratched the surface of what you can do with Appium. Check out these resources to help you on your journey:

  • The Appium command reference - learn about what commands are available, how to use them with specific client libraries, etc...
  • The sample-code repository, where lots more code samples are available
  • discuss.appium.io - this is the Appium community forum, which is a great first place to go for help getting started, or if you think you may have run into a bug
  • The Appium issue tracker - let the Appium maintainers know here if you think you've found a bug