Automatically run Appium tests in Device Farm - AWS Device Farm
Selecting an Appium versionSelecting a WebDriverAgent version for iOS tests

Automatically run Appium tests in Device Farm

Note

This page covers running Appium tests in Device Farm's managed server-side execution environment. To run Appium tests from your local client-side environment during a remote access session, see client-side Appium testing.

This section describes how to configure, package, and upload your Appium tests for running on Device Farm's managed server-side environment. Appium is an open source tool for automating native and mobile web applications. For more information, see Introduction to Appium on the Appium website.

For a sample app and links to working tests, see Device Farm Sample App for Android and Device Farm Sample App for iOS on GitHub.

For more information about testing in Device Farm and how server-side works, see Test frameworks and built-in tests in AWS Device Farm.

Selecting an Appium version

Note

Support for specific Appium versions, Appium drivers, or programming SDKs will depend on the device and test host selected for the test run.

Device Farm test hosts come pre-installed with Appium in order to enable quicker setup of tests for more straightforward use cases. However, the use of the test spec file allows you to install differing versions of Appium if needed.

Device Farm comes pre-configured with different Appium server versions based on the test host. The host comes with tooling that enables the pre-configured version with the device platform's default driver (UiAutomator2 for Android, and XCUITest for iOS). 

phases:
  install:
    commands:
      - export APPIUM_VERSION=2
      - devicefarm-cli use appium $APPIUM_VERSION

To view a list of supported software, see the topic on Supported software within custom test environments.

To select a custom version of Appium, use the npm command to install it. The following example shows how to install the latest version of Appium 2. 

phases:
  install:
    commands:
      - export APPIUM_VERSION=2
      - npm install -g appium@$APPIUM_VERSION

On the Legacy iOS test host, you can choose specific Appium versions with avm. For example, to use the avm command to set the Appium server version to 2.1.2, add these commands to your test spec YAML file. 

phases:
  install:
    commands:
      - export APPIUM_VERSION=2.1.2
      - avm $APPIUM_VERSION

Selecting a WebDriverAgent version for iOS tests

In order to run Appium tests on iOS devices, the use of WebDriverAgent is required. This application must be signed in order to be installed on iOS devices. Device Farm provides pre-signed versions of WebDriverAgent that are available during custom test environment runs.

The following code snippet can be used to select a WebDriverAgent version on Device Farm within your test spec file that is compatible with your XCTestUI Driver version.. 

phases:
  pre_test:
    commands:
      - |-
        APPIUM_DRIVER_VERSION=$(appium driver list --installed --json | jq -r ".xcuitest.version" | cut -d "." -f 1);
        CORRESPONDING_APPIUM_WDA=$(env | grep "DEVICEFARM_APPIUM_WDA_DERIVED_DATA_PATH_V${APPIUM_DRIVER_VERSION}")
        if [[ ! -z "$APPIUM_DRIVER_VERSION" ]] && [[ ! -z "$CORRESPONDING_APPIUM_WDA" ]]; then
          echo "Using Device Farm's prebuilt WDA version ${APPIUM_DRIVER_VERSION}.x, which corresponds with your driver";
          DEVICEFARM_APPIUM_WDA_DERIVED_DATA_PATH=$(echo $CORRESPONDING_APPIUM_WDA | cut -d "=" -f2)
        else
          LATEST_SUPPORTED_WDA_VERSION=$(env | grep "DEVICEFARM_APPIUM_WDA_DERIVED_DATA_PATH_V" | sort -V -r | head -n 1)
          echo "Unknown driver version $APPIUM_DRIVER_VERSION; falling back to the Device Farm default version of $LATEST_SUPPORTED_WDA_VERSION";
          DEVICEFARM_APPIUM_WDA_DERIVED_DATA_PATH=$(echo $LATEST_SUPPORTED_WDA_VERSION | cut -d "=" -f2)
        fi;

For more information about the WebDriverAgent, see Appium's documentation.