Integrate Your Test Suite

Integrate BrowserStack Automate into your test suite using the BrowserStack Nightwatch plugin.

The BrowserStack Nightwatch plugin ensures a plug-and-play integration. It manages your BrowserStack local connections and configures other connections under the hood without any code changes.

Prerequisites

BrowserStack Username and Access key. You can find this in your account profile. If you do not have an account yet, you can sign up for a Free Trial.
Node.js v12 or higher installed on your machine.
Nightwatch 2.6.0 or higher installed on your machine.

Looking for a starter project? Get started with our Nightwatch sample project.

Integration steps

Set BrowserStack credentials

Saving your BrowserStack credentials as environment variables makes it easier to run your test suite from your local or CI environment.

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Install Nightwatch plugin

Use either of the following ways to install the BrowserStack Nightwatch plugin to your project:

      
            NPM
          
            Packagejson
          
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npm i @nightwatch/browserstack --save-dev
"devDependencies": {
  "@nightwatch/browserstack": "^0.2.1",
}

Update your Nightwatch config file

Update your configuration file with the following parameters to run tests on BrowserStack.
At the end of this step, you will have a sample configuration file with BrowserStack capabilities to use in your project.

Add BrowserStack plugin

Add @nightwatch/browserstack to the plugins list in your configuration file.

Set platforms to test on

Set the browsers/devices you want to test within the test_settings object. Our config follows W3C formatted capabilities.

Do you want to dynamically configure platforms?

To dynamically configure platforms across different tests, you can comment out the platforms capability while still passing platform-specific capabilities.

Set number of parallel threads per platform

The parallelsPerPlatform property determines the number of parallel threads to be executed. BrowserStack’s SDK runner will select the best strategy based on the configured value.

Example 1: If you have configured 3 platforms and set parallelsPerPlatform as 2: a total of 6 (3 x 2) parallel threads will be used on BrowserStack.

Example 2: If you have configured 1 platform and set parallelsPerPlatform as 15: a total of 15 (1 x 15) parallel threads will be used on BrowserStack.

Do you want to perform cross-browser testing without test level parallelization?

Remove the parallelsPerPlatform capability from the configuration file.

Do you want to test parallelization without performing cross-browser testing?

Remove or comment out the platform capability while keeping the parallelsPerPlatform capability intact in the configuration file.

Do you want to skip cross-browser testing as well as parallelization?

Remove or comment out the platform and parallelsPerPlatform capabilities from the configuration file.

Enable BrowserStack Local

Test localhost/internal servers in your network

True

False

Test localhost/staging websites that are not publicly accessible

BrowserStack’s Local Testing feature connects with test suites pointing to your localhost URL

Learn more

BrowserStack Local supports all advanced use cases and restricted networks. Contact our support team for assistance in configuring BrowserStack Local for your enterprise.

BrowserStack Reporting

You can leverage BrowserStack’s extensive reporting features using the capabilities:

Do you want to enable/disable auto-marking of test status and session?

The sessionName and sessionStatus are the names of your test sessions and status of your test sessions respectively. They are automatically picked from your test class/spec names and statuses. They do not need to be set manually when using the BrowserStack SDK. To override the sessionName and sessionStatus capabilities, use the following in your browserstack.yml file:

You can configure local testing to start without initializing the BrowserStack binary, or even with an existing binary using a local identifier

testContextOptions:
    skipSessionName: true
    skipSessionStatus: true

Use additional debugging features

By default, BrowserStack provides prettified session logs, screenshots of every failed selenium command, and a video of the entire test. Additionally, you can enable the following features:

Update configuration file with selected capabilities

Copy the following code snippet and add it to the configuration file of your test suite.

```javascript
const additonalEnvironments = require("./environments");

if(!additonalEnvironments.test_settings)
  additonalEnvironments.test_settings = {};

const bstackOptions = {
  'bstack:options' : {
    YOUR_BUILD_NAME_TYPE: "YOUR_BUILD_NAME",
    YOUR_PROJECT_NAME_TYPE: "YOUR_PROJECT_NAME",
    YOUR_TEST_OBSERVABILITY_CAPS_TYPE: "YOUR_TEST_OBSERVABILITY_CAPS",
    YOUR_NETWORK_CAPS_TYPE: "YOUR_NETWORK_CAPS",
    YOUR_CONSOLE_CAPS_TYPE: "YOUR_CONSOLE_CAPS",
    "source": "nightwatch:sample-sdk:v1.0",
    "seleniumVersion" : "4.0.0",
    userName: '${BROWSERSTACK_USERNAME}' || 'YOUR_USERNAME',
    accessKey: '${BROWSERSTACK_ACCESS_KEY}' || 'YOUR_ACCESS_KEY',
  },
}

const browserStack = {
  webdriver: {
    start_process: false,
    timeout_options: {
      timeout: 120000,
      retry_attempts: 3
    },
    keep_alive: true
  },

  selenium: {
    host: 'hub.browserstack.com',
    port: 443
  },

  desiredCapabilities: {
    browserName: 'chrome',
    ...bstackOptions
  }
}

const nightwatchConfigs = {
  src_folders: [],
  live_output: true,
  plugins: ['@nightwatch/browserstack'],
  '@nightwatch/browserstack': {
    browserstackLocal: 'YOUR_LOCAL_CAPS', opts: { forceLocal: false } // set true to manage browserstack local tunnel. Defaults to false.
  },

  test_settings: {
    default: {
      launch_url: 'https://nightwatchjs.org'
    },

    browserstack:  {
      ...browserStack
    },

    'browserstack.YOUR_FIRST_BROWSER': {
      extends: 'browserstack',
      desiredCapabilities: {
        YOUR_FIRST_BROWSER_TYPE: 'YOUR_FIRST_BROWSER',
        YOUR_FIRST_BROWSER_VERSION_TYPE: 'YOUR_FIRST_BROWSER_VERSION',
        'bstack:options' : {
          YOUR_FIRST_OS_TYPE: 'YOUR_FIRST_OS',
          YOUR_FIRST_OS_VERSION_TYPE: 'YOUR_FIRST_OS_VERSION',
          local: 'false'
        }
      }
    },
    'browserstack.YOUR_SECOND_BROWSER': {
      extends: 'browserstack',
      desiredCapabilities: {
        YOUR_SECOND_BROWSER_TYPE: 'YOUR_SECOND_BROWSER',
        YOUR_SECOND_BROWSER_VERSION_TYPE: 'YOUR_SECOND_BROWSER_VERSION',
        'bstack:options' : {
          YOUR_SECOND_OS_TYPE: 'YOUR_SECOND_OS',
          YOUR_SECOND_OS_VERSION_TYPE: 'YOUR_SECOND_OS_VERSION',
          local: 'false'
        }
      }
    },
    'browserstack.YOUR_THIRD_BROWSER': {
      extends: 'browserstack',
      desiredCapabilities: {
        YOUR_THIRD_BROWSER_TYPE: 'YOUR_THIRD_BROWSER',
        YOUR_SECOND_BROWSER_VERSION_TYPE: 'YOUR_THIRD_BROWSER_VERSION',
        'bstack:options' : {
          YOUR_THIRD_OS_TYPE: 'YOUR_THIRD_OS',
          YOUR_THIRD_OS_VERSION_TYPE: 'YOUR_THIRD_OS_VERSION',
          local: 'false'
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

for(let key in additonalEnvironments.test_settings) {
  nightwatchConfigs.test_settings[key] = {
    ...browserStack,
    ...additonalEnvironments.test_settings[key]
  };
}

module.exports = nightwatchConfigs;
```

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Use our Capability Generator to select from a comprehensive set of options you can use to customize your tests.

Run your test suite

Your test suite is now ready to run on BrowserStack. Use the commands defined in your package.json file to run the tests.

To find out the location of the BrowserStack SDK log files, refer to BrowserStack SDK Log Files. If you are looking for more information, see FAQ documentation.

After you run your test, visit the Automate dashboard to view your test results.

Advanced features and use cases

Here’s a list of features and capabilities that you might find useful:

Accept insecure certificates

The acceptInsecureCerts capability suppresses browser popups warning about self-signed certificates usually found in staging environments.

Capability	Expected values
`acceptInsecureCerts`	A boolean. Default is `False`. `True` if you want to accept all SSL certificates.

Change desktop resolution

The resolution capability changes the default desktop screen resolution for your tests on BrowserStack.

Capability	Description	Expected values
`resolution`	Set the resolution of your VM before beginning your test	A string. Default resolution is `1024x768` Supported resolutions: Windows (XP, 7): `800x600`, `1024x768`, `1280x800`, `1280x1024`, `1366x768`, `1440x900`, `1680x1050`, `1600x1200`, `1920x1200`, `1920x1080`, and `2048x1536` Windows (8, 8.1, 10): `1024x768`, `1280x800`, `1280x1024`, `1366x768`, `1440x900`, `1680x1050`, `1600x1200`, `1920x1200`, `1920x1080`, and `2048x1536` OS X (Sequoia, Sonoma, Ventura, Monterey, Big Sur, Catalina, Mojave, and High Sierra): `1024x768`, `1280x960`, `1280x1024`, `1600x1200`, `1920x1080`, `2560x1440`, `2560x1600`, and `3840x2160` OS X (All other versions): `1024x768`, `1280x960`, `1280x1024`, `1600x1200`, and `1920x1080`

Other use cases

Use the following additional links to documentation pages that might help with your test scenarios:

Maximise the desktop browser window in your tests
Handle permission popups in your tests
Use ChromeOptions or Firefox Profile
Test File upload or File download scenarios
Test websites which have basic authentication

Next steps

After you have successfully run your first test on BrowserStack, you might want to do one of the following:

Generate a list of capabilities that you want to use in tests
Find information about your Projects, Builds, and Sessions using our REST APIs
Set up your CI/CD: Jenkins, Bamboo, TeamCity, Azure, CircleCI, BitBucket, TravisCI, GitHub Actions

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