Desktop Testing
Desktop application testing sits in an awkward position in most organizations: less investment than web testing, harder to automate, and often maintained by teams that haven't had to think about desktop UI in years. Yet desktop applications — enterprise tools, developer utilities, internal software — remain critical for many businesses.
Testing
One of Electron's selling points is write-once-run-everywhere. In practice, cross-platform bugs are one of the top sources of Electron app issues: keyboard shortcuts that work on macOS but not Windows, path handling that breaks on Linux, UI that looks fine on Retina displays but
Testing
Electron applications combine Node.js and Chromium into a single runtime, making them powerful but uniquely challenging to test.
Testing
Electron apps run web content in a desktop shell with access to Node.js APIs. This combination is powerful — and dangerous.
Testing
Playwright has first-class support for Electron application testing since v1.9.
Testing
Desktop apps must work on Linux, macOS, and Windows — and each platform has different rendering engines, file system behaviors, system APIs, and distribution formats. A CI/CD pipeline that only tests on one platform misses platform-specific bugs. This guide covers building cross-platform CI/CD testing pipelines for desktop
Testing
Electron applications present a unique testing challenge: they're web apps running in a desktop shell, combining Chromium's rendering engine with Node.js.
Testing
Electron E2E testing with Playwright tests the full application, but unit tests with Jest run in milliseconds and catch business logic bugs during development. The challenge is that Electron's main process and renderer both have APIs that don't exist in Node.js or jsdom test environments.