Can protractor be made to run slowly?

Question

Is there a way to run a Angular E2E test written using protractor slowly so that I can watch what is happening?

Answer 1

Just like George Stocker said in the comment, I don't know why you would want to do this...but you can always add a sleep wherever you want in your test.

browser.sleep(6000);

Answer 2

You can enter in 'debug mode' by placing in your code the command:

browser.pause();

In the debug mode, you would see the following output in your terminal:

------- WebDriver Debugger -------
ready

press c to continue to the next webdriver command
press d to continue to the next debugger statement
type "repl" to enter interactive mode
type "exit" to break out of interactive mode
press ^C to exit

You could then:

• Run command by command by entering c
• Continue to the next debugger statement (next browser.pause()) by entering d
• Enter in interactive mode where you could interact with all the elements by entering repl

Answer 3

Below is my solution to do that. So basically I created a decorator for current control flow execute function, which now additionaly queues a delay of 100ms before each queued action.

This needs to be run before any tests are invoked (outside describe block)

var origFn = browser.driver.controlFlow().execute;

browser.driver.controlFlow().execute = function() {
  var args = arguments;

  // queue 100ms wait
  origFn.call(browser.driver.controlFlow(), function() {
    return protractor.promise.delayed(100);
  });

  return origFn.apply(browser.driver.controlFlow(), args);
};

Answer 4

Previous answers look more like workaround. Another way is to add param to Protractor config:

highlightDelay: 1000

And change to:

directConnect: false

It will delay Protractor actions like clicking or typing for 1 second and will highlight in light blue.