Setup and Install Dependencies for Testing with Google's Puppeteer

Instructor: [00:00] I've gone ahead and installed createReactApp. Now, we don't have to have our applications in React in order to use Puppeteer and Jest. createReactApp just makes it easy for us to get up and going. Now, let's grab our terminal, and install a couple of our dependencies.

[00:14] Some of these include Faker, Jest, Jest CLI, and Puppeteer. Then this might take some time, because with Puppeteer, you need to install an instance of Chromium. Perfect. Next, let's update our test script to just call Jest specifically.

[00:32] Then we'll add another script. We'll call it debug, and it's going to set our node environment variable to debug mode, and we'll call npm test. Puppeteer gives us the option to run our test headless, or live in a Chromium browser.

[00:47] This is how I need to have, because it lets us see exactly what views, dev tools, and network requests the tests that we've written are evaluating. However, this can be slow, heavy, and problematic in CIs.

[00:59] We can use environment variables to control when we run headless or not. We'll make sure to set up our test so that when we want to see our test evaluated, we'll run this debug script. All other times, we'll run just the test script.

[01:13] Now, let's go to our app test file, and remove the code that's already there. Then let's require Puppeteer, create our first described test, where we'll check on the initial page load. We'll test the h1, and make sure that it loads the correct information.

[01:35] Next, we'll do letBrowser equals awaitPuppeteer.launch, and then letPage equals awaitBrowser.newPage. These two variables are a browser and page instance. We'll use these to walk through our test.

[01:51] With this launch method, we can pass through any config options to our browser. This way, we can control and test our applications in different browser settings. We can also change the settings of the browser page that we've created by setting emulating options.

[02:05] First, let's set up our browser, and how we want to use it. Up here at the top, let's create a function called isDebugging. It'll have an object called debugging mode, which will have three property, headless as false, slow mo as 250, and dev tools as true.

[02:22] Then the return's going to be a ternary, based on the environment variable, where we return either debugging mode or an empty object. Then we'll invoke debugging inside of our launch method. Perfect.

[02:35] If you remember back to our package.json, we created this script, debug, where when it runs, it'll set our environment variable to debug. Now, instead of our test, the isDebugging function is going to return our customized browser options, which is dependent on our environment variable, debug.

[02:53] This headless option is where we define whether or not we have Chromium open and running. When it's false, we can watch the browser interact with our app. Slow mo slows down Puppeteer operations by the specific amount of milliseconds described. This is helpful so that we can see what's going on.

[03:11] Then dev tools is a Boole that tells the browser to have dev tools open while interacting with the site. Some other helpful options are executablePath, which takes a string, timeout as a number, and ignoreHTTPSErrors as a Boole.

[03:26] ExecutablePath is a path to a Chromium or a Chrome executable, instead of the bundled Chromium. timeout is the maximum time in milliseconds to wait for the browser instance to start. The default is 30 seconds, and we can pass through 0to disable the timeout. Also, ignoreHTTPSErrors skips through any HTTPS errors that may pop up while navigating through your app.

[03:53] We'll just stick to the top three today. Now, we can set options for our page. We'll do that by doing page.emulate. We'll set the viewport properties of width and height. Then we'll set a user agent as a string.

[04:09] Not only do we have the ability to test different browser options, but we can replicate different page attributes with this page.emulate.