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
npm install
gulp transpile # requires gulp, see below
npm install -g authorize-ios # for ios only
authorize-ios # 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 gulp
npm install -g gulp-cli
npm install -g appium-doctor && appium-doctor --dev
npm install
gulp transpile
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. The final command transpiles all the code so that node
can run it.
When pulling new code from GitHub, if there are changes to package.json
it
is necessary to remove the old dependencies and re-run npm install
:
rm -rf node_modules
npm install
gulp transpile
At this point, you will be able to start the Appium server:
node .
See the server documentation for a full list of arguments.
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:
-
Manually modify the element following
<allow-root>
under<key>system.privilege.taskport</key>
in your/etc/authorization
file to<true/>
. -
Run the following command which automatically modifies your
/etc/authorization
file for you:center npm install -g authorize-ios sudo authorize-ios
At this point, run:
rm -rf node-modules
npm install
gulp transpile
Now your Appium instance is ready to go. Run node .
to kick up the Appium server.
Hacking with Appium for Android
Set up Appium by running:
rm -rf node-modules
npm install
gulp transpile
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. Running npm install
will
update everything necessary. You will also need to do this when Appium bumps
its version up. Prior to running npm install
it is recommended to remove
all the old dependencies in the node_modules
directory:
rm -rf node-modules
npm install
gulp transpile
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:
gulp once
You can run functional tests for all supported platforms (after ensuring that
Appium is running in another window with node .
) with:
gulp e2e-test
Before committing code, please run gulp once
to execute some basic tests and
check your changes against code quality standards.