Cucumber.js VS nightwatch

What you're describing is most commonly known as acceptance testing, or behavior-driven tests. There's an excellent framework for this called Cucumber. They have gems for both plain Ruby and Rails.

It is a known fact that before any developer pushes the code (either to the development environment or Staging environment before migrating to the Production environment), he would be performing unit testing on the code changes that he has made. For unit testing, developers have a variety of unit-testing frameworks to choose from. JUnit and Jasmine are the most popular unit-testing frameworks. Other types of tests performed at a module/package level are functional tests and visual regression tests. Cucumber is a popular choice for Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) or functional testing, and a visual screenshot comparison tool named Wraith is preferred for performing visual regression testing.

Some BDD frameworks such as JBehave, RSpec, Mocha, Jasmine, Cucumber, among others, embrace the use of this template. Spek is not an exception to this rule. The main difference is that it doesn’t force you to use a concrete assertion framework or additional behavioral files (e.g Cucumber or JBehave).

There are a lot of more or less good testing frameworks in the wild. Some of existing testing frameworks doing their job very well and are de facto a standard, like a "cucumber" for BDD testing.

Just to add, anyone who is curious to learn more about BDD I would recommend checking out the Javascript flavor of Cucumber. It's cool stuff and immensely useful! https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-js

And pretty deep into that rabbit hole you get Cucumber and the Gherkin language (https://cucumber.io/); project managers write "natural English" unit tests, but to get them to work, the developers write essentially a chatbot interpreter to process the files and run them.

Cucumber is an automation tool based on the BDD framework, using which you can write automated acceptance tests for web applications in the Gherkin language.

Many testing frameworks use Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) to define tests in plain English. Perhaps the most notable example is Gherkin, the language used by the Cucumber testing framework:

6.NightwatchJS: NightwatchJS is a Node.js-based end-to-end testing framework. Key Features: Simplifies writing test scripts using a simple syntax. Supports parallel test execution. Integrates with Selenium WebDriver for cross-browser testing

NightWatchJS

I have shown you the examples of using selectors in the Google Chrome dev tools, but the idea is similar when you write your automation scripts. I will use the Nightwatch testing framework to write the following snippets which will navigate to some webpage, wait to ensure that an interactive element has appeared in the DOM, and finally click on it. If you want to learn using Javascript with Nightwatch framework for your automated tests, you can start with our guide to this.

The reason for this behavior is thoroughly explained in Understanding the Command Queue Nightwatch.js GitHub wiki (it is a long read but it’s worth it). In this section, we will not look in such detail, this is going to be a summary of sorts. By the way, this command queue example can be found in Loadero’s public GitHub examples repository here.

Nightwatch.js is a popular open-source, Selenium JavaScript-based test automation framework for automating browser-based web applications and websites. It is written in Node.js runtime and uses the W3C WebDriver API (formerly Selenium WebDriver) for interacting with various browsers to perform commands and assertions on DOM elements.

For Firefox-specific options (like command-line args and browser about:config prefs), the property to use is moz:firefoxOptions. That is shipping in the latest default nightwatch.conf.js file, as is the parallel goog:chromeOptions for chromedriver. But if you've got a legacy configuration file—like I did—you'll want to update the old chromeOptions property, too.

Github Discussions

writing and running automated end-to-end tests with Nightwatch.js