Testing Electron Apps – Spectron & Playwright

Testing Electron Apps – Spectron & Playwright

Spectron (official but now deprecated)

npm install --save-dev spectron mocha

const { Application } = require('spectron');
const assert = require('assert');

describe('App launch', function(){
  this.timeout(10000);
  let app;
  beforeEach(()=>{ app = new Application({ path: require('electron'), args: ['.'] }); return app.start(); });
  afterEach(()=> app && app.stop());

  it('shows a window', async()=>{ const count = await app.client.getWindowCount(); assert.equal(count, 1); });
});

Playwright (modern, cross‑platform)

npm install --save-dev @playwright/test electron

// tests/electron.test.js
const { test, expect } = require('@playwright/test');
const { _electron: electron } = require('playwright');

test('app has title', async () => {
  const app = await electron.launch({ args: ['.'] });
  const window = await app.firstWindow();
  await expect(window).toHaveTitle(/MyApp/);
});

Playwright can also record videos and run headless CI.

Unit testing the main process

Use any Node test runner (Jest, Mocha) because the main process is just a Node script.

// main.test.js
const { app } = require('electron');
test('app is not null', () => { expect(app).toBeDefined(); });