Cucumber and NightwatchJS in harmony

This is a demonstration on how to easily connect NightwatchJS and CucumberJS properly, so that you can use Nightwatch assertions and API while using the Cucumber test runner and reporter. This example can also be used as an example of decoupling the Nightwatch Client from the Nightwatch Test Runner, so that you can use it in other environments, or even if you wanted to DI the Nightwatch Client in to Page Objects or tests directly

Requirements

• CucumberJS
• NightwatchJS
• Selenium Stand-Alone

Steps

• Create your nightwatch.json file to hold your configuration.
• Set up your features and steps like you normally would in Cucumber
• Initiate your Nightwatch client stand alone like so

var nightwatch = require('nightwatch');
var config = require('../../nightwatch.json');

var client = nightwatch.initClient(config.test_settings.default)['@client'];

• Create some hooks for BeforeFeatures, AfterFeatures, Before and After. This will handle the connection to selenium for you
• Make your BeforeFeatures hook start up selenium like so

var Selenium = require('nightwatch/lib/runner/selenium.js');

this.registerHandler('BeforeFeatures', function (event, callback) {
    Selenium.startServer(config, function () {
        callback();
    });
});

• Make your AfterFeatures hook shutdown your selenium server after you're done, as such

Selenium.stopServer(function () {
    callback();
});

• Make your Before and After hooks start and stop sessions between each Feature

this.Before(function (scenario, callback) {
    this.client.start();
    this.client.api.pause(3000, callback);
});

this.After(function (scenario, callback) {
    this.client.api.end(function () {
        callback();
    });
});

Congratulations, you've successfully decoupled the NightwachtJS Client from the Test Runner, and it's now ready to use inside the CucumberJS client!

Notes

As of writing this, there doesn't appear to be a good and reliable way to hook in to client.start(), which means that before each feature, when we initiate the session we need to put a pause of roughly 3 seconds to give selenium time to start up and the session ready for use. If you skip that, you run in to issues where the feature will start issuing commands before selenium has a browser open to execute them.

Likewise, pause(), waitForElement() and so on don't halt the cucumber tests to wait. To compensate for that, you need to make use of the callbacks that cucumber passes you. Examples can be found in the features/steps folder