Automation testing has evolved over the years. People are now looking for tools that are easy to use and can generate accurate results more efficiently. Organizations nowadays are opting for open source tools due to the many benefits they have to offer. Puppeteer is one such tool and the subject of this blog post.
Puppeteer is a Node library developed by Google that provides a high-level application programming interface to control chromium browsers over the DevTools protocol. The Google Chrome Dev team does the execution in headless mode by default to increase efficiency. However, they can also configure it for the non-headless mode. Puppeteer can execute the commands like opening the browser instance, navigating to a web page, clicking the items, manipulating the data in the fields, and much more without much hassle. Let’s start with what is Puppeteer
- High-level API (Application Program Interface) – It is a Node library that provides API to control chromium over the DevTools protocol. DevTools Protocol – traditional protocol that offers set of tools to debug and inspect different browser functions. Main Highlights of Puppeteer:
The core purpose of Puppeteer is to empower the dev teams to automate every action done manually in the browser. This also helps the QA teams to perform their tests faster. The main highlights of Puppeteer are:
- Ongoing application releases are validated through automated UI testing for conformance with test cases.
- Easily create the latest automated test environment and run tests directly on the latest chromium engine.
- Validate performance issues by analyzing runtime performance and tracing performance timeline.
- Users can scrape the websites to extract data for analysis.
- Users can preserve the automation execution video alongside generating screenshots and PDFs making reporting a lot easier.
- Responsive testing helps execute the test cases on readily available multiple devices. Puppeteer also supports testing Chrome extensions.
Purpose of Puppeteer:
The main reasons for introducing Puppeteer for automating browser actions are enlisted below:
- As of now, the focus is Chrome. Although Puppeteer for Firefox is out now, it is experimental as of now, and more browsers might come into the domain in the future, but we cannot say that it is a cross-browser automation testing tool. It uses chromium so it also works with MSFT Edge.
- Users may view cross-browser testing as a limitation. However, its speed, stability, simplicity and security aka Chromium Principles outweigh the limitation.
- Speed: ‘0’ performance overhead
- Stability: Its implementation architecture is robust
- Simplicity: it provides a human interactive interface making it easy to comprehend, use and debug.
- Security: it is safe to automate potentially malicious web pages because Puppeteer operates off-process using Chromium.
3. Puppeteer is an API over Cchromium with the focus of minimizing incompatibilities. The version of Chromium bundled with Puppeteer is unique.
4. Users can benefit from promoting headless browser testing to improve efficiency.
5. It is based on an event-driven architecture.
Conclusion
Modern problems require modern solutions. Puppeteer is the latest trend for automation testing due to its fast, reliable and strong base. It is much easier to understand compared to the pre-established automating testing tools.
