Watch Test Files

With the WDIO testrunner you can watch files while you are working on them. They automatically rerun if you change either something in your app or in your test files. By adding a --watch flag when calling the wdio command the testrunner will wait for file changes after it ran all tests, e.g.

wdio wdio.conf.js --watch

By default it only watches for changes in your specs files. However by setting a filesToWatch property in your wdio.conf.js that contains a list of file paths (globbing supported) it will also watch for these files to be changed in order to rerun the whole suite. This is useful if you want to automatically rerun all your tests if you have changed your application code, e.g.

// wdio.conf.js
export const config = {
    // ...
    filesToWatch: [
        // watch for all JS files in my app
        './src/app/**/*.js'
    ],
    // ...
}

info

Try to run tests in parallel as much as possible. E2E tests are, by nature, slow. Rerunning tests is only useful if you can keep the individual test run time short. In order to save time, the testrunner keeps WebDriver sessions alive while waiting for file changes. Make sure your WebDriver backend can be modified so that it doesn't automatically close the session if no command was executed after some duration of time.