Getting Started With Appium

Appium is a free and open-source mobile automation framework used for native, hybrid, and mobile web apps. It works on iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows apps using the WebDriver protocol. WebDriver (the API to automate browsers, maintained by the Selenium project) is currently going through a W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) specification.

This is a preview of the Getting Started With Appium Refcard. To read the entire Refcard, please download the PDF from the link above.

Getting Started

In order to get up and running on your local machine, you need to download an Appium server and client bindings for your preferred programming language. There are Appium language bindings for multiple programming languages. The officially supported ones (in alphabetical order) are:

• C# (.NET)
• Java
• JavaScript (Node.js)
• Objective C
• PHP
• Python
• Robot Framework
• Ruby

Before we dive into installing all of the Appium dependencies, we are first going to look into the iOS and Android dependencies.

This is a preview of the Getting Started With Appium Refcard. To read the entire Refcard, please download the PDF from the link above.

Writing automated scripts to drive an app in Appium is very similar to how it's done in Selenium. You first need to choose a locator strategy. A locator is how you want to find an element. Then, you have the selector, which finds an element based on the provided search criteria.

Below, you will find a table with all available locator strategies for Selenium/Appium:

This is a preview of the Getting Started With Appium Refcard. To read the entire Refcard, please download the PDF from the link above.

The most common operations you'll end up doing in Appium are finding an element (or a set of elements) and performing actions with those elements (e.g. tap, type text, swipe, etc.). You can also ask questions about the elements (e.g. Is it displayed? Is it enabled? etc.), pull information out of the element (e.g. the text of an element or the text of a specific attribute within an element), or perform additional gestures.

Finding an Element

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// The $ is a shorthand for browser. findElement('locator', 'selector') 

// Find 1 element const element = $('locator'); 

// The $$ is a shorthand for browser. findElements('locator', 'selector') 

// Find multiple elements with the same locator const elements = $$('locator');

Work With a Found Element

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// Chain actions together $('locator').click(); 

// Store the element and then click it const element = $('locator'); element.click();

This is a preview of the Getting Started With Appium Refcard. To read the entire Refcard, please download the PDF from the link above.

Appium Service Providers Rather than take on the overhead of standing up and maintaining a test infrastructure, you can easily outsource these services to a third-party cloud provider like Sauce Labs. With Sauce Labs, you'll be able to get access to real devices as well as simulators and emulators.

Note: You'll need an account to use Sauce Labs. Their free trial offers enough to get you started. And if you're signing up because you want to test an open-source project, then be sure to check out their Open Sauce account.

This is a preview of the Getting Started With Appium Refcard. To read the entire Refcard, please download the PDF from the link above.