testing-library-docs VS Playwright

Probably Enzyme was the first to popularize component testing in React by doing shallow rendering and expecting some things to be there in the React component tree. Then React Testing library came and took component testing to a whole new level.

18.react-testing-library

Jest has long been my favorite got to test runner when it comes to UI unit and integration testing. With tools like React Testing Library (Testing Library framework for React) you get the benefit of very easy to write and maintain tests, as well as a quick and efficient way to run our tests.

I'm writing an intergration test with Testing Library where I'm on a boards dashboard area and a user can click a button to create an item on the board. I'm using an intercepting route to do show the popup form. Once finished the user goes back to their area and should see the created board.

This article uses Jest and React Testing Library. It's okay if you want to use other libraries, the fundamentals in this article will help you there as well.

This is the idea behind Testing-Library from what I understand.

https://testing-library.com/

The Testing Library: The Testing Library offers guidance on best practices for testing user interfaces effectively, with a focus on user-centric testing.

There are great tools like Testing Library that render a single component in a single state and then programmatically inspect the resulting DOM. However, the salient details of the rendered HTML – like color, layout, and scale – are hard to express. So, the tests end up brittle (over-specified) or insufficient (under-specified).

LiveCodes provides many of the commonly used developer tools. These include Monaco editor (that powers VS Code), Prettier, Emmet, Vim/Emacs modes, Babel, TypeScript, SCSS, Less, PostCSS, Jest and Testing Library, among others. All these tools run seamlessly in the browser without any installations or configurations. It feels like a very light-weight version of your own local development environment including the keyboard shortcuts, IntelliSense and code navigation features.

We start with a project that was bootstrapped with npx create-next-app. For the E2E test we use Playwright and set it up as described in the testing guide provided by Next.js.

Playwright is a powerful tool developed by Microsoft, it allows developers to write reliable end-to-end tests and perform browser automation tasks with ease. What sets Playwright apart is its ability to work seamlessly across multiple browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and WebKit), it provides a consistent and efficient way to interact with web pages, extract data, and automate repetitive tasks. Moreover, it supports various programming languages such as Node.js, Python, Java, and .NET, that’s making it a versatile choice for web scraping projects. Whether you're scraping public data for analysis, building a web crawler, or automating manual workflows, Playwright has you covered.

The consensus I could gather is either use playwright or use a workaround to solve it in the puppeteer layer. The root cause of the bug is a websocket size limitation on the CDP protocol for chromium.

With the advent of tools like Puppeteer and now Playwright, end-to-end testing has become much easier and more reliable. For anyone who's used Selenium in the past, you know what I'm talking about. Puppeteer has opened the way in terms of E2E tooling, but Playwright has taken it to the next level and made it easier to await for certain selectors or conditions to be fulfilled (via locators), thus making tests more reliable and less flaky. Also, it's a game changer that it introduced a test-runner - this made the integration between the headless browser and the actual test code much smoother.

In this tutorial, our main focus will be on Playwright web scraping. So what is Playwright? It’s a handy framework created by Microsoft. It's known for making web interactions more streamlined and works reliably with all the latest browsers like WebKit, Chromium, and Firefox. You can also run tests in headless or headed mode and emulate native mobile environments like Google Chrome for Android and Mobile Safari.

// playwright.config.ts import { defineConfig } from "@playwright/test"; /** * See https://playwright.dev/docs/test-configuration. */ export default defineConfig({ testDir: "./src/pages", reporter: "list", use: { baseURL: "http://localhost:5432/", }, timeout: process.env.CI ? 10000 : 4000, // ... more options });

Issues with Playwright

Fast and reliable end-to-end testing for modern web apps | Playwright

This means you cannot place test files outside of this directory, which was brought up as a question on Github some time ago. Initially, I thought it would be nice to add another folder in the repo called "scripts", but Playwright does not allow multiple testDir values.

4.Playwright: Playwright is a browser automation library by Microsoft. Key Features: Supports Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit. Provides cross-browser testing capabilities. Allows automating web, mobile, and desktop applications