Tips for configuring Appium – Applitools

This article includes:

Tips for configuring Appium environment. These tips are not directly related to the Applitools Eyes SDK, but we believe that these tips will be useful for developers/testers that are trying to setup Appium environment for the first time.

Appium setup tips:

Appium in its core is actually a Node.js server, and can be run either as an Application downloaded from the Appium website, or directly using "node" (quick installation instructions: http://appium.io/getting-started.html#user-quick-start)
Appium only runs onOSX 10.7 and above, and iOS 6.1 and above, or Android with API version >= 17 (meaning Android 4.2 and above).
For iOS, Appium uses Instruments in order to do the application Automation. You need to make sure that Instruments that Appium uses is the one which points to the relevant version of Xcode (in case you have more than one):
1. use `xcrun -find instruments` to find out which Instruments is used.
2. If you need to change instruments, use the following commands:
  1. `xcrun -kill-cache -find instruments`
  2. `export DEVELOPER_DIR=<PATH TO Developer folder of xcode here>`
  3. `launchctl setenv DEVELOPER_DIR <PATH TO Developer folder of xcode here>`
When running Appium you can set options (such as application package for Android application, or bundle ID for iOS application) either in the Appium application itself, or in the test code, through the DesiredCapabilities class. The important thing to remember is that for each device there is a minimal set of options which needs to be set, even though it looks like these options are not mandatory in the Appium application.
1. For Android: App path (or "app" in DesiredCapabilities), Package (or "app-package"), Activity (or "app-activity"), and the code should include the "version" ("4.2" or above) and "platform" ("Android")
2. For iOS: App path (preferably to the Release version of the Application, or instruments might not work), bundle ID, UDID, version ("6.1" and above) and platform ("ios").

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