Appium Desktop
Appium Desktop is an application for Mac, Windows and Linux that gives you the power of Appium Automation server in a beautiful and flexible user interface. It’s basically a graphical interface for the Appium server. You can set options, start/stop the server, view logs, etc. You also don’t need to use Node/NPM to install Appium, since Node runtime is bundled with Appium Desktop.
** Note: **Appium Desktop used to include an inspector UI. It is now its own separate application. Appium Inspector.
Download Appium Desktop
You can always get the latest version of the server GUI from the GitHub release page.
If you’re on Windows or macOS, Appium Desktop will automatically provide you with an updated version of your app once it’s released. If you’re having trouble updating, simply delete or uninstall the app and re-download the latest one from the link above.
Please note that Appium Desktop and Appium_ are not the same thing. Appium Desktop is a graphical front end to Appium with additional tools. Appium Desktop releases at its own pace and has its own versioning system. If you report problems with Appium Desktop, be sure that _ includes the version of _Appium Desktop and the version of the Appium Server you are using (see below).
If you are using macOS, you will need to install the Appium Desktop application by copying the application from the downloaded DMG file to your own file system (the best place is the “Applications” folder). Running Appium from the attached DMG itself is not supported and will not work.
Install on macOS
If you’re using a desktop application on macOS, when you run it, you’re likely going to get some bugs like the application doesn’t open, or isn’t verified by Apple, or something similar. The easiest way to get around this problem is to run Xattr-CR on the files you download. So, suppose you download appium-desktop.dmg. You can then run xattr -cr appium-desktop.dmg before opening the disk image. The same goes for the ZIP version (or.app itself).
The reason was that the Appium team didn’t have a paid Apple developer account, so our app wasn’t signed with a certificate they approved, so the operating system tried to stop it from running. Running the command above circumvents this security limitation.
Known problems
- Some Windows 10 users encountered when installing EXE
PathTooLongException. The solution to this problem is to update the Settings on Windows toEnabling long Paths.
Directions for use
These instructions assume that you are familiar with Appium and Appium related concepts. If you are new to Appium, please visit appium. IO and read our introductory materials. These instructions also assume that you have downloaded the server GUI and inspector application.
The app provides an easy way to download and run the Appium Automation server, as well as a tool to check out elements in Chrome/Safari and your Android or iOS apps. Its various functions are described in the following sections.
Start a simple server
When you open Appium Desktop, you are greeted by the server startup window. The basic option is to start an Appium server with all the default functions and the ability to modify hosts and ports. The start button will also let you know which version of the Appium server you are running, which can be useful when reporting problems to the Appium team.
Start a server with advanced options
By clicking on the “Advanced” TAB, you can set all the server flags available in Appium. This is for advanced users and can only be modified after consulting the Appium documentation.
Server provisioning
If you use the Advanced server option, you have the ability to save a configuration for later use. Simply save the preset on the Advanced TAB and you can then invoke and start the server with that configuration on the Preset TAB.
Server console output window
Once you start the server, it will start on the host and port you specify and open a new window showing the server’s log output.
This is fairly straightforward, with no real interaction possible other than the use of buttons to stop the server. You can also copy and paste logs from this window, which is useful for reporting Appium problems.
Reporting problems and request capabilities
Appium Desktop is open source and we use GitHub for problem tracking. Please simply report an issue on our issue tracker. We will try to determine if the problem you reported is related to Appium Desktop or Appium Server. If it is not related to Appium Desktop, we will close the issue and ask you to open a normal Appium issue on Appium’s Main issue tracker. Please clarify whether the problem you are experiencing is Appium Desktop specific or Appium problems in general to save yourself and us valuable time. You can do this by seeing if the problem also recurs on the Appium command line server. If so, submit your report to Appium’s Problem tracker.
Have a feature request? Follow the same process to submit the problem to the appropriate tracker (in this Repo if the request is specific to Appium Desktop, or in Appium’s main tracker if it is specific to Appium).
Advanced topics and troubleshooting
Appium cannot detect environment variables on a Mac
Appium uses environment variables such as ANDROID_HOME, and various binaries such as PATH depending on you. Appium has no problem receiving these variables when running them from the command line in an environment where you have properly set them up. However, Appium Desktop does not run in a shell or command line environment, so by default it does not have access to environment variables that you set in your shell startup script or configuration file. To solve this problem, we use the shell-env package to get the environment variables defined in your shell. However, this package is only found in certain common startup scripts, such as ~/.bashrc, ~/.bash_profile, and ~/.zshrc. If you set your Appium environment variables in any other way, you will need to create one of these default init scripts and set your environment variables there so that Appium Desktop will receive them successfully.
Warning about being on read-only file systems
This may mean that you are trying to start Appium Desktop from a downloaded disk image (.dmg file). This is not the supported mode for running Appium Desktop. To install Appium Desktop correctly, copy the Applications in the disk image to your local file system, such as /Applications. Then, run the application from the new location.
Developer notes
Want to hack on Appium Desktop? That’s great! Please go to our contribution document for information on how to set up the development environment and submit changes to the project.