Taking Screenshots with Protractor

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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');
    });

// 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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Felipe Araujo

Thanks a lot, my friend. So helpfull!
Andy

Hi there,

Just recently I published a brand new plugin protractor-screenshoter-plugin – https://github.com/azachar/protractor-screenshoter-plugin that captures for each browser instance a screenshot and console logs. The snapshot is made optionally for each expect or spec. It comes with a beautiful angular and bootstrap based analytics tool to visually check and fix tests results.

Check it out at https://github.com/azachar/protractor-screenshoter-plugin.

Also, I created a list of all available alternatives – https://github.com/azachar/protractor-screenshoter-plugin/wiki/Alernatives, so if you find something else, please do not hesitate to add it there.
ananth vyayavaram

Hi Team, I want to s zoom out web page in chrome,How to send both ‘ctrl ‘ and ‘-‘ through sendkeys in protractor help me please.

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