BrowserStack Settings

BrowserStack is one of the most popular cloud testing platforms. Using it with Nightwatch is very straightforward and there is configuration in the auto-generated nightwatch.conf.js file.

Once you have an account, you can set the following environment variables. Dotenv files are also supported by Nightwatch.

  • BROWSERSTACK_USERNAME
  • BROWSERSTACK_ACCESS_KEY

Remember to also enable HTTP keepalive for improved network performance.

Nightwatch supports these integration features out-of-the-box with BrowserStack:

  • setting test names on BrowserStack
  • marking tests as "passed" or "failed"
  • displaying the link to BrowserStack Build page at the end of the test run.

Example Configuration

Use this example configuration to try running your tests on BrowserStack.

nightwatch.conf.js 
module.exports = {
  src_folders: [],
  

  webdriver: {
    keep_alive: true,
    timeout_options: {
      timeout: 60000,
      retry_attempts: 3
    }
  },
  

  test_settings: {
    default: {
      launch_url: 'https://nightwatchjs.org'
    },
    

    browserstack: {
      selenium: {
        host: 'hub-cloud.browserstack.com',
        port: 443
      },
      

      // More info on configuring capabilities can be found on:
      // https://www.browserstack.com/automate/capabilities?tag=selenium-4
      desiredCapabilities: {
        'bstack:options' : {
          local: 'false',
          userName: '${BROWSERSTACK_USERNAME}',
          accessKey: '${BROWSERSTACK_ACCESS_KEY}',
        }
      }
    },
    

    'browserstack.chrome': {
      extends: 'browserstack',
      desiredCapabilities: {
        browserName: 'chrome'
      }
    },
    

    'browserstack.firefox': {
      extends: 'browserstack',
      desiredCapabilities: {
        browserName: 'firefox'
      }
    },
    

    'browserstack.ie': {
      extends: 'browserstack',
      desiredCapabilities: {
        browserName: 'IE',
        browserVersion: '11.0',
        'bstack:options' : {
          os: 'Windows',
          osVersion: '10',
          local: 'false',
          seleniumVersion: '3.5.2',
          resolution: '1366x768'
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Integrating BrowserStack Local

BrowserStack Local is a feature that lets you test your localhost, staging or other private websites not accessible publicly. In order to use this feature, you need to download the browserstack-local package and run it with your test suite.

Note: BrowserStack Local needs to be instantiated only once at the beginning of your build and stopped once all the tests execution has completed.

You can refer to this sample implementation maintained by the BrowserStack team.

Connecting to BrowserStack via a proxy server

You can specify proxy settings in Nightwatch by adding the proxy key in your nightwatch.conf.js

nightwatch.conf.js 

  test_settings: {
    default: {
      desiredCapabilities: {
        // Your capabilities
      },
      proxy: {
        "host": "",     // "127.0.0.1"
        "port": "",     // "8081"
        "protocol": ""  // "http"
      }
    }
  }

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