Adding plugins

Overview

Nightwatch v2.0 introduces a new interface for defining plugins and extending the base functionality of Nightwatch with your own custom commands and assertions.

Plugins are essentially wrappers over custom commands and assertions. Plugins are installed in your node_modules folder.

Authoring a Nightwatch plugin

If you're new to publishing NPM packages, read the Creating and publishing unscoped public packages guide first.

A Nightwatch plugin needs to be installed from NPM in the same project where Nightwatch is used (or as a global NPM package).

Folder structure:

The folder structure is very simple and looks like below. A nightwatch folder needs to be present in the plugin where the custom commands and assertions will be automatically loaded from.

  ├── nightwatch/ 
  |   ├── commands/
  |   |    ├── my_new_custom_command.js
  |   |    └── my_other_custom_command.js
  |   └── assertions/
  |        ├── my_new_custom_assertions.js
  |        └── my_other_custom_command.js
  ├── index.js
  ├── LICENSE.md
  ├── package.json
  └── README.md

The Nightwatch runner will pick up the custom commands and assertions automatically if the plugin is defined with the above structure.

Installing a new plugin

Once the plugin will is available in NPM (or another package repository), you can simply install it in your project folder and then update the Nightwatch config file by adding it to the plugins Array.

First, install the plugin from NPM:

npm i my-new-plugin --save-dev

Then update your nightwatch.conf.js (or nightwatch.json) and add it to the plugins list:

nightwatch.conf.js
{
  plugins: ['my-new-plugin']
  

  // other nightwatch config options
  

}

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