Do I have to use Spectron to test Electron?

Recently I found some difficulty to plan automation testing for our application using Electron. I've tried to use Spectron, which looks like the official framework to test Electron apps, however, I found the documentation was very hard to understand on their website.

I know there are some famous apps using Electron, e.g Slack, Wordpress and Github Desktop. I wonder if they are really using Spectron or something else as automation to test their apps.

Pretty much I just want to figure out if Spectron is the only way to test Electron.

In terms of end to end testing I would say that Spectron is the way to go. It can be pretty hard to get up and running, but Spectron is built upon WebdriverIO and there you'll find a lot of documentation.

To get up and running I would propose the following.

npm install spectron mocha --save-dev

my-first-test-case.e2e.js

const electron = require('electron');

describe('my first test case', function () {

  beforeEach(() => {
    this.app = new Application({
      path: electron,
      args: ['.'],
    });

    return this.app.start();
  });

  afterEach(() => {
    if (this.app && this.app.isRunning()) {
      return this.app.stop();
    }
  });

  it('creates a new tab when account is added', function () {
    const accountName = 'awesomeMail';

    return this.app.client.waitUntilWindowLoaded()
      .waitForVisible('h1')
      .getText('h1')
      .then(text => expect(text).toEqual('Welcome'));
  });
});

And then you run

mocha my-first-test-case.e2e.js

Or if you dont have mocha installed globally

node_modules/.bin/mocha my-first-test-case.e2e.js