How to set up and run a complete Appium test on your own iOS app.

Courtney Zhan

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4 min read

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May 28, 2023

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In previous articles, we focus on setting up Appium and executing XCUITest scripts in the iOS Simulator as a proof of concept. These scripts just execute actions, they have no QA value.

In this article, I will do a simple yet complete Appium test case. A complete test means:

• Prepare your app for testing
• Inspect and Locate Controls
• Drive controls in the app
• Perform an assertion (a.k.a checkpoint)

This article will roughly cover how to set up Appium tests for your app (rather than a sample app).

Export the iOS app file

Firstly, export your iOS app file. For simulators, you will need it in an .app.zip format. If you are running this on a physical device, export it as an .ipa file instead.

Follow the below article to export your app for the iOS simulator:

Start a session in Appium Inspector

Once your app is exported, you can test your set up and start inspecting elements via Appium Inspector. Appium Inspector is a new utility for inspecting controls in mobile apps.

Please note the prefix: appium:, otherwise it won’t work.

Appium Inspector is quite intuitive once you understand session creation and app navigation. See these articles for a brief introduction on how to use Appium Inspector if you are new to Appium Inspector: Session Creation, Inspecting Elements and App Navigation.

Writing your test

There are three basic parts to your Appium automation test:

1. Appium capabilities — these will enable Appium to open your app to start the test
2. Actions — the commands to be executed (i.e. interacting with elements)
3. Assertions — the key part of testing; verify your app’s content matches what you expect.

Appium Capabilities

These should be an almost exact copy-paste from your Appium Inspector session creation capabilities. Here is an example for my own app (named iCurrency) compared with the Appium Inspector capabilities written in Ruby.

   the_opts = {
      caps: {
        platformName: 'ios',
        automationName: 'xcuitest',
        platformVersion: '16.2',  # change to match your Xcode
        deviceName: 'iPhone 14',  # change here if necessary
        app: "/Users/courtney/sample-apps/iCurrency.app.zip" # ipa file
      },
        appium_lib: {
          server_url: "http://127.0.0.1:4723",
          wait: 0.1,
        },
    }

Alongside the app capabilities, keen readers might also see that I specified the Appium server URL (server_url: “http://127.0.0.1:4723" ) and how long to wait for a connection before timing out (0.1 seconds). The server URL is required for v2 and your test may not run without it. I don’t believe wait is necessary, but it is good practice to include.

I recommend defining your Appium options in the before(:all) hook of your test script. e.g.:

  before(:all) do
    opts = {
      caps: {
        automationName: 'xcuitest',
        platformName: 'ios',
        platformVersion: '16.2',    
        deviceName: 'iPhone 14',    
        app: "/Users/courtney/sample-apps/iCurrency.app.zip"
      },
      appium_lib: {
        server_url: "http://127.0.0.1:4723",
        wait: 0.1
      },
    }
    @driver = Appium::Driver.new(opts).start_driver  
  end

Actions

This is where your test shines!

Use the locators from the Appium Inspector and execute your commands. Don’t forget to include assertions.

A super simple test I’ll use as an example is just to check the app name.

  it "Get App Name" do 
    application_element = @driver.find_element :class_name, 'XCUIElementTypeApplication'
    application_name = application_element.attribute :name
    expect(application_name).to eq("iCurrency")
  end

Executing your Tests

Once your test is complete, run it from the command line or your favourite IDE.

Since I have used RSpec in my test, install the RSpec gem:

% gem install rspec

Then run the test on the command line:

% rspec icurrency_app_spec.rb

The output will look like below: