Book Image

UI Testing with Puppeteer

By : Dario Kondratiuk
Book Image

UI Testing with Puppeteer

By: Dario Kondratiuk

Overview of this book

Puppeteer is an open source web automation library created by Google to perform tasks such as end-to-end testing, performance monitoring, and task automation with ease. Using real-world use cases, this book will take you on a pragmatic journey, helping you to learn Puppeteer and implement best practices to take your automation code to the next level! Starting with an introduction to headless browsers, this book will take you through the foundations of browser automation, showing you how far you can get using Puppeteer to automate Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. You’ll then learn the basics of end-to-end testing and understand how to create reliable tests. You’ll also get to grips with finding elements using CSS selectors and XPath expressions. As you progress through the chapters, the focus shifts to more advanced browser automation topics such as executing JavaScript code inside the browser. You’ll learn various use cases of Puppeteer, such as mobile devices or network speed testing, gauging your site’s performance, and using Puppeteer as a web scraping tool. By the end of this UI testing book, you’ll have learned how to make the most of Puppeteer’s API and be able to apply it in your real-world projects.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

What is browser automation?

If you go and look for the word "automation" in Wikipedia, it will tell you that it is "a process or procedure performed with minimal human assistance." If you are a developer, or just a geek, I bet you love to create scripts to automate tasks. You might also create environment variables, so you don't have to type long paths, or even create cool Git commands, so you don't need to remember all the steps required to create a new branch upstream.

When I got my first Mac, I discovered an app called Automator. I fell in love with it. You can automate tasks and connect applications just using drag and drop. If you use macOS and you've never played with Automator, please give it a try! But Automator isn't the only app. There are many workflow apps in the market, such as Hazel or Alfred.

Automation is even in the cloud and is available to the general public. Apps such as IFTTT and Zapier allow users to automate everyday...