appium-remote-debugger

A Node.js frontend for the Remote Debugger protocol used by Appium to connect to iOS webviews and Safari. Written using ES6+.

Safari's version of the WebKit API

Safari implements a wonky version of the WebKit API. It is not documented. The JSON version of the protocol is documented in the WebKit source code, in Source/JavaScriptCore/inspector/protocol/.

There is good documentation for the closely related API from Chrome DevTools, to be found here.

API

This is an event emitter, which emits a RemoteDebugger.EVENT_PAGE_CHANGE event when there has been a change to the page. This should be caught and handled as the calling code wishes. It also emits a RemoteDebugger.EVENT_DISCONNECT event when the server disconnects the last application connected.

The steps to using the RemoteDebugger involve instantiating an object, then running connect and selectApp. After this the instance will be listening for events from the server (i.e., the webview or browser).

Selenium "atoms"

The remote debugger uses the standard Selenium JavaScript atoms to interact with web pages.

To refresh the bundled atoms/ output, use the Update Selenium Atoms manual workflow (.github/workflows/update-atoms.yml) in the GitHub Actions tab, or build locally. Full steps, inputs, and tooling are documented in docs/update-atoms.md.

Test

npm test
npm run e2e-test