Appium Desktop is an app for Mac, Windows, and Linux which gives you the power of the Appium automation server in a beautiful and flexible UI. It is a combination of a few Appium-related tools:

• An graphical interface for the Appium Server. You can set options, start/stop the server, see logs, etc... You also don't need to use Node/NPM to install Appium, as the Node runtime comes bundled with Appium Desktop.
• An Inspector that you can use to look at your app's elements, get basic information about them, and perform basic interactions with them. This is useful as a way to learn about Appium or as a way to learn about your app so you can write tests for it.

This is a work in progress!

There are not currently any releases of Appium Desktop available for users. If you want to play with it, you will need to build it from source following the directions for developers below.

Appium Desktop is an Electron app. Electron apps have a basic architecture that consists of a main process (which runs Node.js) and possibly many renderer processes (essentially browser windows which display HTML/CSS and can run JS---this is where the UI lives). Interactions between the two types of process are made possible by a built-in interprocess communication (IPC) mechanism.

For the UI, Appium Desktop is built using React and Redux for managing UI state and interactions, with PhotonKit for various UI components.

Why did we decide to go this route?

• Electron bundles apps for any platform
• Appium is written in JS so it's a nice way to stick with that as the main language; we can rely on Appium's community to maintain this app and follow Appium's coding standards
• Using web technologies to build a UI is a skill that many people have, whereas building native UIs is more esoteric
• Because Electron's main process runs in Node, we can import Appium as a strict dependency rather than be forced to manage it as a subprocess. This is great for speed and error handling
• It's fun!

Credits where credit is due: for the project's tooling, we started with electron-react-boilerplate, which comes with an excellent set of helpers scripts, many of which we still use in an unmodified fashion. Many thanks to that project!

0. Clone the repo
1. Install dependencies (npm install)

NB: the app currently does not work with the dependencies installed this way. This is because we rely on a version of Appium which has not yet been published. To work around this, after you npm install, simply pull down Appium master in another repository, install its dependencies, run npm link in that repo, then come back to Appium Desktop's repo and run npm link appium. This will overwrite the version of Appium that we use with the development version that works.

There is a handy script for preparing the code and launching a development version of the app:

npm run dev

This launches both the app and a development server which feeds UI code changes to the app as you make them (this is called 'hot reload'). In most cases, if you're simply making UI changes, you won't need to relaunch the app in order to see them reflected. If you do, simply kill this script and start again.

Another important thing to do before committing is to run a lint tool on your code:

npm run lint

Finally, you might want to run the app in a non-development mode in order to make sure that everything works as expected if you were to publish:

npm run build  # prepare resources
npm start  # start a production version of the app

If you encounter the error 'Cannot find module /path/to/sqlite3/node_sqlite3' run the script this command rebuilds the native modules to work with Electron

npm run rebuild # rebuild native modules to work with version of Node electron uses instead of system version

To package the app for your platform, run:

npm run package

To package the app for all platforms, run:

npm run package-all

This will build the apps with the latest version of electron and put the various app packages in dist/.