Integrate Your Test Suite with BrowserStack

This section will help you migrate your existing test suite to run on BrowserStack Automate. It also covers key features and best practice recommendations for smooth integration.

Select your integration method

BrowserStack SDK (Recommended)

Plug-n-play solution that takes care of all the integration steps for you
Legacy integration

Perform the integration steps yourself. Useful for custom frameworks and advanced use-cases

Using the BrowserStack SDK is the recommended integration method for NodeJS. The SDK handles your integration steps automatically. Use the Manual integration only when you are using custom frameworks or want to handle advanced parallelization use-cases.

Setup authentication

Set environment variables for BrowserStack credentials

In the run a sample build section, we set up BrowserStack credentials directly in the test script.

That method works for a sample build, but for a production-grade integration we recommend you store your credentials as environment variables and use those environment variables in your code.

      
            macOS or Linux
          
            Windows PowerShell
          
            Windows Cmd
          
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export BROWSERSTACK_USERNAME="YOUR_USERNAME"
export BROWSERSTACK_ACCESS_KEY="YOUR_ACCESS_KEY"
$env:BROWSERSTACK_USERNAME "YOUR_USERNAME" 
$env:BROWSERSTACK_ACCESS_KEY "YOUR_ACCESS_KEY" 
setx BROWSERSTACK_USERNAME "YOUR_USERNAME" 
setx BROWSERSTACK_ACCESS_KEY "YOUR_ACCESS_KEY" 

set BROWSERSTACK_USERNAME=YOUR_USERNAME
set BROWSERSTACK_ACCESS_KEY=YOUR_ACCESS_KEY

Connect CDP Endpoint

Connect to the CDP endpoint at BrowserStack as shown in the following example:

Connect your website under test

BrowserStack can integrate with test suites pointing to your localhost URL, staging environment and even websites behind one or more proxies/firewalls.

NPM - Language Bindings
CLI Interface - Binary

Install the package

Add browserstack-local to your project using the following npm command:

Set the access key and use available methods in your test script

Set the bs_local_args variable to your BrowserStack Access key and and use the following methods provided by the local library to manage your local connection:

Method	Description
`bs_local.start()`	Expects bs_local object. Returns a callback when the tunnel has started successfully. Your test script should start executing after this callback has been invoked.
`bs_local.stop()`	Call this method after your test suite is complete.
`bs_local.isRunning()`	Check if BrowserStack local instance is running.

Use the following example code snippet to manage your local connections:

Add capabilities to enable BrowserStack local

Run a test using Browserstack Local

Try running a localhost after completing the above steps. Check out our sample Git repository for more details.

Download BrowserStack Local

Unzip the binary

Unzip the downloaded file and move it to a folder/directory from which you have permission to start it using your command line or terminal.

Run the binary using your command line or terminal

Run the following command to initiate the BrowserStack Local connection

      
            macOS or Linux
          
            Windows PowerShell
          
            Windows Cmd
          
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# Step 3 - Run this command in your terminal to start the BrowserStack Local binary. Your working directory should be where you have the downloaded binary.
./BrowserStackLocal --key YOUR_ACCESS_KEY
# Step 3 - Run this command in your terminal to start the BrowserStack Local binary. Your working directory should be where you have the downloaded binary.
./BrowserStackLocal --key YOUR_ACCESS_KEY
# Step 3 - Run this command in your command prompt. Your working directory should be where you have unzipped BrowserStackLocal.exe
BrowserStackLocal.exe --key YOUR_ACCESS_KEY

If your staging environment is behind a proxy or firewall, additional arguments, such as proxy username, proxy password, etc, need to be set. Check out Local Binary parameters to learn about additional arguments.

Set up config to enable local

Run a test using Browserstack Local

Try running a localhost after completing the above steps. Check out our sample Git repository for more details.

Migrate your test cases

This section will help you with all the config changes, commonly used features, and best practices for a smooth migration of your test cases to BrowserStack.

Set OS-browser combination to run test

We recommend running your build using a single browser like Chrome or Firefox to begin with. This will isolate issues during the migration phase and help with faster debugging. Refer the capabilities as shown to use Chrome. Once you’ve migrated your test cases or have achieved stability with Chrome or Firefox, you can set up cross-browser testing.

Organize tests

Use the following capabilities for naming your tests and builds. This ensures effective debugging, test reporting, and build execution time analysis.

Capability	Description
`name`	Name for your test case. For example, `Homepage - Get started`
`build`	CI/CD job or build name. For example, `Website build #23`, `staging_1.3.27`

Use a new buildName name every time you run your test cases. This ensures that sessions are logically grouped under a unique build name and helps you monitor the health of your test suite effectively.

A build can only have a maximum of 1000 tests and post that a new build gets created with a ‘-1’ suffixed to the original build name.

Mark test as passed or failed

To mark whether your test has passed or failed on BrowserStack, use the Javascript executor in your test script. You can mark a test as passed or failed based on your test assertions.

The arguments passed in the Javascript method for setting the status and the corresponding reason of the test are status and reason

status accepts either passed or failed as the value
reason accepts a string value

Set up debugging capabilities

Use the following common debugging capabilities for your tests:

Set the the debug capability to record video of the entire test execution
Console Logs with log level ‘errors’ are enabled by default. Set the console capability to enable different log levels, such as warnings, info, verbose, errors, and disable.

Commonly used features and advanced-use cases

Here’s a list of features and capabilities you may find useful.

Lighthouse Integration

Learn how to Integrate Lighthouse to your Playwright tests for improving the quality of your web pages.

Chrome Extension Testing

Learn more about Testing Chrome Extension on your Playwright tests with BrowserStack Automate.

Simulate IP geolocation

The browserstack.geoLocation capability lets you test your websites across different countries.

Note that this capability is supported on the Enterprise plan only. You can contact sales to get an Enterprise plan for your account.

Capability	Description	Expected values
`browserstack.geoLocation`	Set the country code you want your test to detect	A string. An ISO 2 country code `FR` for France, `CN` for China Check out the complete list of 45+ countries we support.

Others

Following are a few additional links to documentation pages that might help with your test scenarios:

Change the desktop browser window in your tests
Test File upload scenarios
Prevent sensitive test data from appearing in the Automate logs using mask commands

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