Nightwatch v2 is Now in Beta

We're finally ready to announce the first beta release for Nightwatch v2.0.

We're finally ready to announce the first beta release for Nightwatch v2.0. Upcoming beta releases will incrementally be made available in NPM under the next tag, so in order to install it you'll have to run the following:

npm install nightwatch@next

Over the coming weeks we will also finish updating the documentation with more pages in the Guide section and documenting the new APIs.

New features

Here are the release notes which contain details about important changes since the last alpha release (2.0.0-alpha.4).

You can also revisit the blog post which announced the first alpha release to get a better sense of the list of new features and enhancements, but let's quickly recap the most important ones here as well, briefly:

New user actions API, support for Chrome DevTools Protocol, and WebDriver BiDi

One of the main changes in v2 is that the underlying architecture was completely reworked to use the official Selenium-Webdriver library in communicating with the browser drivers.

This means better cross-browser integration and more reliable DOM element handling.

More details about changes related to this are available in the previous blog post about the alpha release.

New integrated test runner for using CucumberJS in Nightwatch

In the previous v2.0.0-alpha.3 we have announce the new integrated test runner for CucumberJS as well as an upgraded Mocha test runner which is based on Mocha v9. Another noticeable update in this version was the new programmatic API.

For using CucumberJS in Nightwatch 2, no other plugins are necessary, other than the Cucumber library itself (version 7.3 or higher).

More details on how to use CucumberJs with Nightwatch 2 and examples are avatars in the bundled examples folder.

You can also try out these examples immediately on a new project, the auto-generated Nightwatch config file contains the necessary settings:

npx nightwatch --env cucumber-js

Check the v2.0.0-alpha.3 for more details.

Insights from the Nightwatch 2021 User Survey

A few months ago when we announced that we’re working on Nightwatch v2, we also sent out a short survey to help us gather more feedback from the community about the kind of features we should build.

Now that the v2 is available in beta we are also excited to share the results from the first-ever user survey we did for Nightwatch.

We asked users to rate us out of 10, and the average of all results was 7.7 - we’re glad to see such positive sentiment in the community. However, we want to take this number much higher and we have some exciting updates planned to achieve this.