Trying out WebdriverIO 6

During last March it was announced the release of WebdriverIO v6. Here are some of the new features and enhancements that I found.

Assertion library out of the box

In previous versions you needed to add an assertion library such as chaijs to perform the usual

expect(actualValue).to.equal(expectedValue, 'I am the error message');

Now webdriverio comes with its own assertion library that is made on top of jest expect and it have some steroids. e.g.:

Before

const actualText = myWebElement.getText();
expect(actualText).to.equal(expectedText, 'Text does not match expected');

After

expect(myWebElement).toHaveText(expectedText, { message: 'Text does not match expected' });

Did you note the object param in the toHaveText function? It has to be with another new feature on v6.

Named Parameters

It was a bit uncomfortable to add null on some functions to get to a given parameter, e.g.:

// Waits for myWebElement to NOT exist
myWebElement.waitForExist(null, null, true); 

But fortunately it was improved to:

// Waits for myWebElement to NOT exist
myWebElement.waitForExist({ reverse: true });

New services defintion

On a similar approach the services configuration are now in the same list as the service defintion, e.g.:

// wdio.conf.js
exports.config = {
  // ...
  service: [
    ['sauce', {
        sauceConnect: true, // @wdio/sauce-service configuration
        sauceConnectOpts: { 
          //...
        } // @wdio/sauce-service configuration
      }]
    ],
    // ...
};

Thos are just three examples of the new features on v6, check the official release notes for more details.