Installing

Taiko is a Node.js library and runs on all platforms that is supported by Node.js latest LTS version (Windows, MacOS, Linux).

Once you have the latest version of node installed you can install and run Taiko in any of the following ways.

Quick Installation

If you want to experiment or quickly automate a web page you can get started with Taiko using Node’s npx package runner.

npx taiko

This will download chromium browser and launch Taiko’s recorder. You can also use npx to run existing taiko scripts for example

npx taiko sample.js

Note: Depending on how you install Taiko npx either caches or downloads Taiko refer the npx documentation for more information.

Global Installation

If prefer having the taiko command installed globally, you can run

npm install -g taiko

To verify your installation run

taiko --version

You should see something as follows (x = current version numbers)

taiko --version
Version: 1.x.xx (Chromium: x.x.x) RELEASE

If everything looks fine, try using the recorder to record a test.

Local installation

As any other Node.js library Taiko, you can add Taiko to your node projects by running

npm install -D taiko

This will add Taiko as a dev dependency in your project’s package.json

You can also run

npx taiko

To launch the Taiko recorder locally. This will refer to the local installation of Taiko in the node_modules folder.

Unreleased versions

If you want to experiment with unreleased versions and try out experimental features that you can install Taiko directly from Github using

npx https://github.com/getgauge/taiko

or

npm install -g https://github.com/getgauge/taiko

or

npm install -D https://github.com/getgauge/taiko

or

package.json

...
"dependencies": {
"taiko": "getgauge/taiko",
}
....

Install options

You can skip downloading chromium while running or install Taiko by setting the environment variable TAIKO_SKIP_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOAD to true for example in bash or zsh

TAIKO_SKIP_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOAD=true npx taiko

Each Operating System has it’s own way of setting environment variables please refer OS specific instructions on how to do that.

Installing as root User

Note: Avoid installing Taiko as a root user unless you are using docker containers. Refer to npm and Node js documentation for installing packages using the right permissions.

When installing taiko globally as a root user, npm explicitly changes the UID and GID, which can cause the installation to fail with Permission Denied error.

The solution to fix this is to pass --unsafe-perm --allow-root to npm

npm install -g taiko --unsafe-perm --allow-root