appium-from-source.md

Running Appium from Source

So you want to run Appium from source and help fix bugs and add features? Great! Just fork the project, make a change, and send a pull request! Please have a look at our Style Guide before getting to work. Please make sure the unit and functional tests pass before sending a pull request; for more information on how to run tests, keep reading!

Make sure you read and follow the setup instructions in the README first.

Setting up Appium from Source

An Appium setup involves the Appium server, which sends messages back and forth between your test code and devices/emulators, and a test script, written in whatever language binding exists that is compatible with Appium. Run an instance of an Appium server, and then run your test.

The quick way to get started:

$ git clone https://github.com/appium/appium.git
$ cd appium
$ ./reset.sh
$ sudo ./bin/authorize-ios.js # for ios only
$ node .

Hacking on Appium

Make sure you have ant, maven, adb installed and added to system PATH, also you would need the android-16 sdk (for Selendroid) and android-19 sdk installed. From your local repo's command prompt, install the following packages using the following commands (if you didn't install node using homebrew, you might have to run npm with sudo privileges):

npm install -g mocha
npm install -g grunt-cli
node bin/appium-doctor.js --dev
./reset.sh --dev

The first two commands install test and build tools (sudo may not be necessary if you installed node.js via Homebrew). The third command verifies that all of the dependencies are set up correctly (since dependencies for building Appium are different from those for simply running Appium) and fourth command installs all app dependencies and builds supporting binaries and test apps. reset.sh is also the recommended command to run after pulling changes from master. Running reset.sh with the --dev flag also installs git hooks that make sure code quality is preserved before committing. At this point, you're able to start the Appium server:

node .

See the server documentation for a full list of arguments.

Like the power of automating dev tasks? Check out the Appium Grunt tasks available to help with building apps, installing apps, generating docs, etc.

Hacking with Appium for iOS

To avoid a security dialog that may appear when launching your iOS apps you'll have to modify your /etc/authorization file in one of two ways:

1. Manually modify the element following <allow-root> under <key>system.privilege.taskport</key> in your /etc/authorization file to <true/>.

2. Run the following grunt command which automatically modifies your /etc/authorization file for you:

   sudo ./bin/authorize-ios.js
   

At this point, run:

./reset.sh --ios --dev

Now your Appium instance is ready to go. Run node . to kick up the Appium server.

Hacking with Appium for Android

Bootstrap running for Android by running:

./reset.sh --android --dev

If you want to use Selendroid for support on older Android platforms like 2.3, then run:

./reset.sh --selendroid --dev

Make sure you have one and only one Android emulator or device running, e.g. by running this command in another process (assuming the emulator command is on your path):

emulator -avd <MyAvdName>

Now you are ready to run the Appium server via node ..

Making sure you're up to date

Since Appium uses dev versions of some packages, it often becomes necessary to install new npm packages or update various things. There's a handy shell script to do all this for all platforms (the --dev flag gets dev npm dependencies and test applications used in the Appium test suite). You will also need to do this when Appium bumps its version up:

./reset.sh --dev

Or you can run reset for individual platforms only:

./reset.sh --ios --dev
./reset.sh --android --dev
./reset.sh --selendroid --dev

Running Tests

First, check out our documentation on running tests in general Make sure your system is set up properly for the platforms you desire to test on.

Once your system is set up and your code is up to date, you can run unit tests with:

grunt unit

You can run functional tests for all supported platforms (after ensuring that Appium is running in another window with node .) with:

bin/test.sh

Or you can run particular platform tests with test.sh:

bin/test.sh --android
bin/test.sh --ios
bin/test.sh --ios7
bin/test.sh --ios71

Before committing code, please run grunt to execute some basic tests and check your changes against code quality standards. Note that this should happen automatically if you ran reset.sh --dev, which sets up the git pre-commit hooks.

grunt lint
> Running "newer:jshint" (newer) task
> 
> Running "newer:jshint:files" (newer) task
> No newer files to process.
> 
> Running "newer:jshint:test" (newer) task
> No newer files to process.
> 
> Running "newer:jshint:examples" (newer) task
> No newer files to process.
> 
> Running "jscs:files" (jscs) task
> >> 303 files without code style errors.

Running individual tests

If you have an Appium server listening, you can run individual test files using Mocha, for example:

DEVICE=ios71 mocha -t 60000 -R spec test/functional/ios/testapp/simple.js

Or individual tests (e.g., a test with the word "alert" in the name):

DEVICE=ios6 mocha -t 60000 -R spec --grep "alert" test/functional/ios/uicatalog

For windows you have to use set DEVICE=android in cmd to run above tests, for example:

set DEVICE=android
mocha -t 60000 -R spec test/functional/android/apidemos/alerts-specs.js

NOTE: For Android, you will need an emulator/device with screen size of 4.0" (480x800). Some tests might fail on a different screen size.

DEVICE must be set to a valid value: ios71, ios6, android, selendroid