What’s new in Nightwatch: February 2023

Latest updates, features and releases in the month from February 2023

Welcome to the sixth post in a monthly series that summarises the happenings in the world of Nightwatch and helps you test better.

NEW FEATURES AND RELEASES

VS Code

We have released v1 of our VS Code Extension! This latest version takes the extension out of pre-release and adds a number of great features.

You will now be able to use settings like headless mode, opening the html report and the number of parallels in use. You will also be able to select one the environments available in your `nightwatch.conf.js` You can see the changes below.

 

Our final V2 release!

We have released our final versions of NightwatchJS V2. We managed to release v2.6.16-18 We’ve added in a few bug fixes. Please can you see about updating your projects with the latest.

V3 Alpha!

The first Nightwatch V3 alpha release is now available on npm. You can install it with `npm install nightwatch@alpha`. In this we have 2 major features:

Nightwatch Inspector

The Nightwatch Inspector allows you to debug your tests. You can use it to test out commands and well as use the explore mode to help you highlight the elements on the page.

Improved Performance

We have improved our parallel runner implementation to make it faster. Parallel testing is now going to be taking advantage of workers in NodeJS. We used to create different child processes and this has a certain amount of overhead that is now gone. If you couple this with adding the following…


globals: {

    waitForConditionPollInterval: 50

  }

And in your webdriver based environments config add

"pageLoadStrategy":"eager"

… you will should notice a decent improvement in your test suites run times.

Finally…

We have done a number of significant updates and releases across the various projects we manage. Make sure you update to the latest versions! We have a number of great features coming over the next month. 

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. P.s. If you become our 300, 400, 500, and so on, member on Discord, we’ll send you a small gift!

Check out more updates in our release notes.

P.S Selenium Conference is coming

Next March, the global Selenium community will be meeting up for the first in-person SeleniumConf since 2018. Come join me, Simon Stewart, Diego Molina and other Selenium core committers, as well as automated testing experts from around the world, as we discuss what’s new and coming in Selenium, the WebDriver ecosystem, BiDi functionality, state model-based testing and much more. 

The conference will be March 29-30, with optional full-day workshop sessions on March 28, in Chicago, IL USA. You can see the full agenda here . Ticket prices are already community-friendly, but use this discount code — nightwatch2023seconf200 — to save an additional $200 on any ticket, conference-only or conference+workshop. Register here

Does your manager need convincing? Download this “Convince My Boss” e-mail template to help get things moving along. I look forward to welcoming you to Chicago next March!