Taiko
Documentation

Home

overview

Taiko is free and open source Node.js library with a simple API to automate Chromium based browsers (Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera) and Firefox.

Taiko tests are written in JavaScript or any language that compiles to JavaScript, for example TypeScript.

Why Taiko ? #

Taiko's API is designed for testers. Unlike other testing frameworks, Taiko treats the browser like a black box. With Taiko you can write scripts by looking at a web page and without inspecting its source code.

For example on google.com, this command will click on any element with the text 'Google Search' (a button on the page).

click("Google Search")

Taiko’s API mimics user interactions with the browser. For example if you want to write into an element that’s currently in focus, use

write("something")

Or, if you want to write into a specific text field

write("something", into(textBox({placeholder: "Username"})))

And, of course other selectors including XPath for rare use cases

click({id: "elementId"})
click($(`//*[text()='text']`))

Taiko's API also implicitly waits for the web page or the elements in the page to finish loading. This considerably speeds up your tests. Taiko tests run fast, really fast. Here's a quick comparison with other tools.

* Source code for running this comparison is available on Github

Running a test #

Here's what a simple Taiko script looks like

const { openBrowser, goto, write, click, closeBrowser } = require('taiko');

(async () => {
    await openBrowser();
    await goto("google.com");
    await write("taiko test automation");
    await press("Enter");
    await closeBrowser();
})();

To run this script, install the latest version of Node.js, save the script to JavaScript file (for example test.js), run the following in your favorite CLI (Command Line Interface)

$ npx taiko test.js
✔ Browser opened
✔ Navigated to url "http://google.com"
✔ Wrote taiko test automation into the focused element.
✔ Clicked element containing text "Google Search"
✔ Browser closed

This command will download the latest version of the Chromium browser and run the tests in headless mode. If you want to see how the tests execute in the browser window you can use the --observe option.

$ npx taiko test.js --observe

Recording a test #

Taiko comes with a Recorder writing test scripts. You can launch the recorder (after installing the latest version of Node.js) by simply running

$ npx taiko

This launches the Taiko prompt

Version: 1.x.x (Chromium:XX.x.x)
Type .api for help and .exit to quit
>

You can now use Taiko’s API as commands in this prompt. For example, to launch a Chrome browser instance use

> openBrowser()

To automate this Chrome browser instance, you can use other commands from the Taiko API. Here's the example for searching Google.

> goto("google.com")
> write("taiko test automation")
> click("Google Search")

You can see the browser performing the actions as you type and press enter for each command.

Taiko recorder

Taiko’s REPL keeps a history of all successful commands. Once you finish a flow of execution, you can generate a test script using the special command .code

> .code

On execution, Taiko generates readable and maintainable JavaScript code.

const { openBrowser, goto, write, click } = require('taiko');
(async () => {
try {
    await openBrowser();
    await goto("google.com");
    await write("taiko test automation");
    await click("Google Search");
} catch (error) {
    console.error(error);
} finally {
    closeBrowser();
}
})();

You can copy and modify this code or save it directly to a file in the directory where you launched the recorder using

.code test.js

Choose to continue automating or finish the recording using

> .exit

Like mentioned earlier, you can run this script using

$ npx taiko test.js

Taiko vs Selenium #

Taiko is very different from Selenium. Selenium uses WebDriver a W3C standard. Taiko uses Chrome DevTools Protocol. Taiko does not need a driver (like ChromeDriver) to connect to and automate the browser. Taiko bundles the latest version of Chromium, however it can automate any browser that supports the Chrome DevTools Protocol.

Taiko does not support Webkit based browsers like Safari. Taiko does not support testing mobile applications. There are no plans to support this in the future.

Also unlike Selenium, which can be scripted in many programming languages, Taiko will only support JavaScript and languages or languages that compile to JavaScript.

Selenium is a general purpose browser automation tool and Taiko's API will remain focused on testing.

Please use Selenium if you need

Try out Taiko if you