What’s new in Nightwatch: August 2022
Latest updates, features and releases in the month from August 2022
Welcome to the second post in a monthly series that summarises the happenings in the world of Nightwatch and helps you test better.
Webinar: Watch all the new features in action
It has been 8 months since Nightwatch was acquired by BrowserStack. Since then, we have released a lot of new updates to Nightwatch including the new HTML reporter, Pause and Debug, Nightwatch Chrome Recorder and many more.
However, if you have missed any of these updates, join us for a session on 14th September at 9AM PT | 4PM GMT where we will walk you through:
The latest features that deliver a great experience while testing with Nightwatch
Why you should consider moving to the latest version of Nightwatch
What’s coming in the next set of releases—an exciting surprise for all users!
Register here for this event. If you can’t make it, register for the event and we’ll send you a recording.
Latest feature releases
Nightwatch Chrome Recorder
We are excited to introduce the new Nightwatch Chrome Recorder extension that helps you generate Nightwatch test scripts without writing a single line of code.
This extension helps you to export Chrome DevTools recording as Nightwatch test scripts. This will speed up your development cycle by creating integrated or end-to-end tests instantly. In fact, a recent survey by Gitlab revealed that 49% of organizations had already started using Low Code/No code tools.
This is based on the Chrome DevTools Recorder, a tool that allows you to record and replay test actions directly in the browser. We decided to use it since it’s plugged into the browser, giving the convenience of not switching context or dealing with other third-party tools.
Support for native mobile drivers
Though never advertised, Nightwatch is one of the very few frameworks that support testing for native mobile apps. Recently, however, we realized that some of the drivers needed an update for this to function properly. We have fixed them now. Do try them out if you test on native mobile apps.
Retaining HTML report between test runs
If you have been using our new HTML Reporter that came out in v2.2.1 you would have noticed that it would overwrite the file after every run. This will now create a new file for each run so that you can compare things over time.
Nightwatch-Schematics
If you are an AngularJS user, we have released Nightwatch-schematics v1.0. This has all the same goodness that we have in create-nightwatch but specifically for AngularJS users. The team have done a number of improvements and removing of deprecated AngularJS features. Click here to know more and start using this.
TypeScript Improvements
TypeScript is an area of the JavaScript ecosystem that is constantly growing. We have made sure all the functions have `await` or `async` support, support for a `nightwatch.conf.ts`, completing of the definitions we hadn’t got to in previous releases. These are all accessible via the @types/nightwatch NPM package. A huge shout out to the BrowserStack colleagues and NightwatchJS community members for improving this.
Documentation
We have added a lot of documentation around how to integrate with a number of 3rd party tools like CI services, like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Bamboo, and Azure Pipelines.
We’ve also added details on how to integrate your tests with a Slack reporter.
A lot of exciting new features are planned for the next release. Tell us your suggestions on Github or if you want to discuss something with us or have ideas to improve this post, hit us up on Discord.