Nightwatch was published in January 2014, initially created by Andrei Rusu as a tool to enable writing of automated UI tests in a straightforward way, and which will require as little configuration and additional libraries as possible.
Right after it was published, Nightwatch has seen steady growth and has now become one of the most popular Node.js end-to-end testing solutions for web applications and websites.
From the very first Github Issue opened by Evan You (creator of Vue.js) and seamless integration with the Vue.js framework, to being featured on the 2017 ThoughtWorks Technology Radar, Nightwatch has become an established household name in the wider automated testing industry.
Instead of building a highly flexible tool which supports a lot of plugins and customization we aim to deliver a tool that is packed with everything you need out of the box.
We believe that in order to write tests you should only focus on writing tests and not have to add multiple external plugins and dependencies. In our experience, this usually leads to increasingly more time spent on maintaining dependencies and solving configuration issues, instead of writing actual tests.
We do however provide mechanisms to extend the existing API commands and assertions when needed and you can also use Nightwatch programmatically if you wish. We also do our best to ensure that Nightwatch follows an industry agreed upon practice and we try to be compatible with other existing tools.
You can even write Node.js unit tests in Nightwatch to test your backend APIs. These tests are using the same assertion libraries and the same syntax and runner. We can even combine end-to-end tests with unit/integration tests in the same test run.
Progress regarding the issues being worked on from the current version can be tracked on Github Projects.
The focus in this version was to stabilize the existing waitForElement and other element related commands and improve the compatibility with the WebDriver API, particularly for window related commands.
More details on the v1.2 release can be found on the Github release pages.
We plan on continuing to improve the compatibility with the Webdriver API and the cross-browser testing support. In addition we hope to address some of the issues related to concurrency, particularly in Firefox.
At the same time, we are working on adding BDD describe interface for writing tests, as we believe this will make users (especially new ones) a bit more comfortable with writing tests in a well-known syntax.
You can follow the development progress on Github Projects
We are currently planning the roadmap for the v1.4 release but we hope that either this version, or a potential v2 instead, will include support for Nightcloud.io - our upcoming cloud testing service.
Development of our own cloud testing platform Nightcloud.io is slowly but surely moving forward. Perhaps not at the same speed as a full dev team working in a properly funded company but rest assured that it is progressing.
We have made the decision to try and grow the platform organically, without using external funding. We are building Nightcloud at the same time that we maintaing Nightwatch and we hope to be ready with the Beta release by the end of 2019.
We are however open to partnership suggestions and we'd be happy to discuss any ideas or proposals. Drop us a line if you're interested in partnering with us for the development of Nightcloud.
Nightwatch is maintained by an independent software consultancy based in Oslo, Norway, without any major corporate developer powerhouse behind it, nor any VC to influence its roadmap. The maintainers and the larger community of users and contributors have sole responsibility for the roadmap and direction of Nightwatch.
However, the team behind Nightwatch spends dozens (often hundreds) of hours per month working on bug fixes, enhancements, verifying PRs and issues on Github, writing documentation, answering support requests and other maintenance tasks. We are doing this for over five years now and will continue to do so, but your support could boost our efforts and it would enable us to spend even more time on developing the framework.
There are several ways in which your company (or you as an individual) can support Nightwatch financially. You can become a backer or your company can sponsor Nightwatch on the Open Collective platform (or an alternative sponsorship platform). You can also hire the Core Team to provide training and consulting for your project.
Report any bugs or feature requests on GitHub. Please review the Contributing Guidelines before submitting a new issue.
Issues with the documentation, such as inconsistencies, typos or mistakes can be reported on the Docs Github repository.
If you'd like to contribute API command examples, you can do so by adding them in this folder: github.com/nightwatchjs/nightwatch-docs/tree/master/api/method. These are automatically built into the individual API command pages.
For example, the clearValue page is built out of: github.com/nightwatchjs/nightwatch-docs/blob/master/api/method/clearValue.md.
You're encouraged to ask any questions you might have regarding the usage of Nightwatch or its API on the Mailing List or on Twitter. In addition, there is a StackOverflow Nightwatch.js tag at your disposal.
A curated list of articles, guides, and video tutorials from the wider Nightwatch community. Please note that the articles listed here aren't written by the Nightwatch team and we cannot guarantee their full accuracy.
Nightwatch collaborator Domenico explains why end-to-end testing (and also other forms of testing) is an important topic to him. A good explanation of the testing pyramid concept and a good introduction to automated testing.
Domenico demonstrates how to run end-to-end tests with Nightwatch using the Browserstack cloud testing platform. You can find other Nightwatch-related coding videos on his Youtube channel.
A good introductory article of the main features and capabilities of Nightwatch.
Percy.io engineer, David Jones, gives an introduction on how you can add Percy snapshots to your Nightwatch.js tests for automated visual testing.
Core JavaScript maintainer for popular Drupal CMS, Sally Young gives an account about integrating Nightwatch in Drupal 8.6.
The platform that powers the Firefox Public Data Report, a weekly public report on the activity, behavior, and hardware configuration of Firefox Desktop users. Built with React and using Nightwatch v1.2
AWX provides a web-based user interface, REST API, and task engine built on top of Ansible. AWX is built in Python and uses Nightwatch v0.9.
Worldview is an interactive interface for browsing global, full-resolution satellite imagery. Built with React and using Nightwatch v0.9.
The WebRTC samples This is a collection of small samples demonstrating various parts of the WebRTC APIs. Uses Nightwatch v1.1.
Examples for running Nightwatch tests against BrowserStack Automate infrastructure. Uses Nightwatch v1.0
Feel free to tip us off about any articles or open source projects that we should list on this page.