What’s new in Nightwatch: July 2022

Latest updates, features and releases in the month from July 2022

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

Latest feature releases

Pause and debug

Announcing Pause and Debug with Nightwatch! With .pause(), you can pause your tests mid-execution and understand the state of your web app by using debugging tools such as DevTools. Hand-in-hand with pause, .debug() allows you to execute Nightwatch commands and assertions while your test is paused. Give it a shot and let us know what you think.

See these changes in action here, where Praveen Umanath, Senior Director of Product, showcased the new debug and maintenance features we’ve added at Selenium Conf Lite.

Actionable error messages

Nightwatch will now guide you to prevent similar issues from appearing in the future. We’ve started with the main error messages that come up regularly and will be improving this over time. Feel free to come to collaborate with us over on Github or Discord on other error messages.

Template tests with `create-nightwatch`

We built the create-nightwatch package to help people get started with browser automation which can be daunting. It now offers you some template tests to get started. If you have suggestions for other template tests come to collaborate with us over on Github or Discord.

TypeScript Improvements

TypeScript is an area of the JavaScript ecosystem that is constantly growing. As we improve NightwatchJS we are also making sure that we are improving TypeScript support. These are regularly released via the @types/nightwatch NPM package. Thank you to the BrowserStack colleagues and NightwatchJS community members for improving this.

Documentation revamp

We have made big changes to our documentation to help you:

• Easily make edits to the new documentation pages using the markdown syntax

• Find more answers in the documentation with a much wider set of topics and more depth within each

• Explore new Nightwatch capabilities with documentation for new use cases

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.