⚠️ After more experiments, I came to the conclusion that SikuliX was not stable enough, and at least in my opinion, it is a very old code-base and not well designed. So I decided to re-write SikuliX as part of the Karate project.

karate-robot is available from version 0.9.5 onwards. Desktop automation is something that many teams need, so please contribute !

karate-sikulix-demo

Demo of using Karate and SikuliX for visual testing of Windows desktop apps. And other Karate capabilities that show off the language-neutral stand-alone executable.

What is notable is how you can use the Karate UI to step-through and debug / troubleshoot tests. Click the image below to watch a demo video.

Instructions

• only a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is needed as a pre-requisite (version 1.8.0_112 or greater)
  • verify this on the command line by typing: java -version
• clone this Git repository or simply download it as a zip file and extract it
• download the latest sikulixapi.jar from here
  • this is optional if you only want to run the other demos
• download the latest Karate standalone JAR (karate-0.9.4.jar) from here
• place the JAR file(s) in the same folder as the project you cloned, and rename the Karate JAR to karate.jar
• (Windows only) run the command:
  • karate calc.feature
  • you can also step-through using the Karate UI:
    • karate calc.feature -u

Notes

• no Java IDE or code compilation required
• with a "visual" approach, there is no need to worry about getting the control names or id-s and messing around with "inspect.exe"
• being able to step-through and re-play steps is key to maintenance in the long term
• Karate makes things like re-usable functions, assertions and reports possible
• the Karate Visual Studio Code extension created by Kirk Slota allows you to run a feature file directly from the IDE.

Other Demos

Note that you need the sikulixapi.jar only for the first one below.

Command	Description
./karate web-mac.feature	Mac only (you may need to make the karate batch file executable first) demo of using SikuliX to automate a web-browser "visually". You can try to edit the test to use another browser, see video
java -jar karate.jar calc-driver.feature	(Windows only) using the Microsoft WinAppDriver and Karate's UI automation capabilities, and you can compare this with calc.feature which uses SikuliX
java -jar karate.jar graphql.feature	GraphQL web-service API test that shows off advanced JSON assertions in the response. Make sure you view the HTML reports in target/cucumber-html-reports
java -jar karate.jar github.feature	Uses Chrome and Karate's native web-browser UI automation capabilities, this should work out of the box if you have Chrome installed
java -jar karate.jar -m cats-mock.feature -p 8080	Starts mock API server on port 8080, now you can open cats.html from the file system and play around. This demonstrates how web-dev teams can use Karate.
java -jar karate.jar cats-test.feature	Runs a test against the mock server above (which has to be started and running first using the above command). You can also add a -u option to see how to step-through a test using the Karate UI. Note how you can re-play any step at any time, something you can't do with traditional IDEs or de-buggers.
java -jar karate.jar cats-test.feature -e mock	Shows how a karate feature can start a mock automatically using JavaScript. Compare this with the command above.