By Hank Duan, Julie Ralph, and Arif Sukoco in Seattle

Have you worked with WebDriver but been frustrated with all the waits needed for WebDriver to sync with the website, causing flakes and prolonged test times? If you are working with AngularJS apps, then Protractor is the right tool for you.

Protractor (protractortest.org) is an end-to-end test framework specifically for AngularJS apps. It was built by a team in Google and released to open source. Protractor is built on top of WebDriverJS and includes important improvements tailored for AngularJS apps. Here are some of Protractor’s key benefits:

• You don’t need to add waits or sleeps to your test. Protractor can communicate with your AngularJS app automatically and execute the next step in your test the moment the webpage finishes pending tasks, so you don’t have to worry about waiting for your test and webpage to sync. 
• It supports Angular-specific locator strategies (e.g., binding, model, repeater) as well as native WebDriver locator strategies (e.g., ID, CSS selector, XPath). This allows you to test Angular-specific elements without any setup effort on your part. 
• It is easy to set up page objects. Protractor does not execute WebDriver commands until an action is needed (e.g., get, sendKeys, click). This way you can set up page objects so tests can manipulate page elements without touching the HTML. 
• It uses Jasmine, the framework you use to write AngularJS unit tests, and Javascript, the same language you use to write AngularJS apps.

Follow these simple steps, and in minutes, you will have you first Protractor test running:

1) Set up environment

Install the command line tools ‘protractor’ and ‘webdriver-manager’ using npm:

npm install -g protractor

Start up an instance of a selenium server:

webdriver-manager update & webdriver-manager start

This downloads the necessary binary, and starts a new webdriver session listening on http://localhost:4444.

2) Write your test

// It is a good idea to use page objects to modularize your testing logic
var angularHomepage = {
  nameInput : element(by.model('yourName')),
  greeting : element(by.binding('yourName')),
  get : function() {
    browser.get('index.html');
  },
  setName : function(name) {
    this.nameInput.sendKeys(name);
  }
};

// Here we are using the Jasmine test framework 
// See http://jasmine.github.io/2.0/introduction.html for more details
describe('angularjs homepage', function() {
  it('should greet the named user', function(){
    angularHomepage.get();
    angularHomepage.setName('Julie');
    expect(angularHomepage.greeting.getText()).
        toEqual('Hello Julie!');
  });
});

3) Write a Protractor configuration file to specify the environment under which you want your test to run:

exports.config = {
  seleniumAddress: 'http://localhost:4444/wd/hub',
  
  specs: ['testFolder/*'],

  multiCapabilities: [{
    'browserName': 'chrome',
    // browser-specific tests
    specs: 'chromeTests/*' 
  }, {
    'browserName': 'firefox',
    // run tests in parallel
    shardTestFiles: true 
  }],

  baseUrl: 'http://www.angularjs.org',
};

4) Run the test:

Start the test with the command:

protractor conf.js

The test output should be:

1 test, 1 assertions, 0 failures

If you want to learn more, here’s a full tutorial that highlights all of Protractor’s features: http://angular.github.io/protractor/#/tutorial