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This post is part of a ten-part series on how to write better Protractor tests. You can find the rest of the series here.

Protractor provides the ability to take a screenshot via the browser.takeScreenshot() function. After you’ve taken a screenshot, though, you probably want to save it. The easiest way is to create a helper function that will save it for you like so:

    // at the top of the test spec:
    var fs = require('fs');

    // abstract writing screen shot to a file
    function writeScreenShot(data, filename) {
        var stream = fs.createWriteStream(filename);
        stream.write(new Buffer(data, 'base64'));
        stream.end();
    }

    // ...

    // within a test:
    browser.takeScreenshot().then(function (png) {
        writeScreenShot(png, 'exception.png');
    });

One thing you’ll probably want to do is setup a way to automatically capture screenshots whenever there is a test failure. You can write this yourself, but one convenient way is to simply use the npm module protractor-html-screenshot-reporter. That module has the added benefit of outputting a pretty HTML report.

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