Framework to choose

Based on the following criteria:

  • It supports iOS, Android, and H5, and maintains unified interfaces as far as possible to reduce development and maintenance costs
  • Support multi-platform (cross-platform, can run on OSX, Windows and Linux desktop system), multi-language (Appium chose the Client/Server design mode, as long as the Client can send HTTP requests to the Server, the Client can be implemented in any language). Appium also extends the WebDriver protocol, and previously the WebDriver API could be directly inherited
  • Large number of users, rich documentation

How Appium works

What do you need to install?

Through the above principle, in fact, it is very clear what needs to be installed, right

Environment Preparation (iOS) : When testing iOS in Appium, I relied on Apple development environments such as Xcode (greater than 4.6.3) and Apple Developer Tools, which I also installed.

Before installing Appium, to ensure that Appium’s dependencies are in place, you can use appium-Doctor for validation, with all green indicating success.

Next, install appium Server: download appium, select the installation package with the suffix of.dmg, and follow the prompts to install it step by step.

Finally, install python-client:

  1. Install Python.
  2. Install the Python editor;

These two have been installed before learning Python, so I don’t need to go into details. The editor is optional; I personally installed PyCharm.

  1. PIP install appium-python-client PIP install appium-python-client

The original Client part, in fact, we could have not installed anything, just need to choose a development language, and then directly based on WebDriver C/S Protocol (JSON Wire Protocol) can write automated test code. But doing so can be a lot of work, because you have to deal with some of the work related to the agreement. Fortunately, the Appium project has encapsulated the work of low-level protocol handling into libraries for many major programming languages, and by investigating these libraries, we can greatly simplify the task of writing test cases.

The Client part that needs to be installed is actually the installation of these Libraries. To select Python, the Library you need to install is appium-python-client.

Appium-desktop

What is Appium-desktop?

Project address: github.com/appium/appi…

Appium Server and Inspector in Desktop GUIs for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Appium mobile test has a very important component, Appium-Server, which is mainly used to listen to our mobile devices (real machine or emulator), and then parse the Appium test scripts written in different programming languages, and then drive the mobile devices to run the test.

But appium-Server hasn’t been updated in a year or two. So, the new tool appium-desktop is coming! It continues the mission of Appium-Server, which, of course, is still currently available.

Download and install appium-desktop download address: here

Select the relevant package to download according to your platform, double-click the icon to open it and click Start Server to open it.

Note: Appium-server can be uninstalled after installing appium-desktop