Protractor is reaching end of life - what are your plans?

Last Month, the Angular team announced they would end development of protractor at the end of 2022.

https://github.com/angular/protractor/issues/5502

Starting with Angular v15, Protractor tests will no longer run.

Does your team have E2E tests in Protractor, and have you considered how you will handle the deprecation?

I’m curious about thoughts on preferred tool to migrate to - seems like Cypress is the clear current frontrunner in terms of number of users, but maybe other frameworks have compelling features as well.

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This :slight_smile: :wink:

We moved to Cypress and I’m pretty happy about it also, should have done it before the deprecation also.
Thank god we didn’t have that many UI tests yet :smiley:

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I know of a certain large remote desktop product that went the protractor test route for testing. Pretty sure they have hundreds of protractor tests by now… hmmm. I’m going to have to ask around.

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I never used Protractor so I won’t shed any tears, but a few people I worked with have used it and most of them are planning on switching to Cypress, as a replacement.

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It’s not really a replacement to move to Cypress is it? Because Protractor, as I understood it’s use, talks to the application @fullsnacktester may recall more of how it was used than I do, or am I wrong here?

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We’re using Protractor and know we’ll need to move; no final decision so far but Cypress has been mentioned as a possible.

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Methinks you’re right, Protractor is based on Selenium beneath the surface and Cypress has it’s own thing going on.

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Another option that looks promising is Webdriver IO.

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I lost touch with progress on protractor when things moved from Angular JS 2.x.to Angular n+.

I remember the earlier versions of Protractor for the modern version of Angular was missing most of the deeper integrations anyway.

They could of brought this back and I would of missed it, because I moved on from testing Angular based websites.

I’ve recently been using Playwright with Jest. It’s excellent and I would recommend it.

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Hi all, I am looking for a tool to migrate protractor automation suite and researched about Playwright and Webdriver IO. Can anyone please suggest based on your experience which tool Playwright or Webdriver IO is the best tool in terms of Angular and Salesforce based technology.

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Hi and welcome to the Ministry of Test community Jeni .

Lets see if we can wake up a few people here, because not sure how much I can help either. .You may want to look at Provar, on the Salesforce side of things, not sure how much it costs, I know almost nothing about SF though really. I’m assuming that you looked at Playwright because you are a .NET software house? If not, then you want to choose a tool that might play to your teams skills more.

Lets hear what the rest of the gang say.

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We’re planning to migrate our existing Protractor automation (for an Angular JS front-end) over to Playwright this year; from what I’ve seen so far it’s likely to be a relatively easy transition (I hope!). Our API layer automation (mocha-based) is remaining unchanged, and I can’t comment on automation for Salesforce as it’s not an area I have any experience in

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Playwright for Python (pytest) is our choice… and there are several reasons why…

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WebdriverIO (or Selenium) may be more familiar in paradigm to Protractor since they have similar Webdriver-based architectures, but I’d definitely recommend looking at Playwright!

You can pick the language you’re most comfortable in to write your tests in. And, at least in my experience - it feels more “native” to the browser working with the DevTools spec, it has a lot of QoL enhancements, and a helpful/rapidly growing community to boot!

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A previous workplace had a small suite started in Protractor and opted to switch to WebDriver.io before building more into the suite. From a scripting POV, it was not a hard transition.

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Just an FYI, EndBridge (Endbridge: Protractor + Cypress) offers an easy migration from Protractor to Cypress.

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Also, for those looking to move from Protractor to Playwright, QualityLogic offers easy migration there.

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