APIs are a powerful way to connect to a company’s products and services to use their existing infrastructure seamlessly. Here at CrossBrowserTesting we are no exception to this statement
What is an API?
The term API is an acronym, and it stands for “Application Programming Interface.”
APIs make your life as a developer much easier by allowing you to connect to your company/service’s resources and access relevant information. By creating a simple endpoint to talk to, APIs take away the hassle of handling and transforming the data that you are dealing with.
To connect with an API you simply call a http request to the correct URL that is needed. You may request data or be sending it the endpoint, either way it is a very clean and simple way to communicate back and forth.
With Cross Browser Testing’s API you can connect to a variety of different services to conduct your testing without the need of our web-app. Here is a list of our main services that are supported through our API:
- Live Tests
- Automation Tests
- Screenshots
- Record & Replay
You can view all of our support services at our API website here
Where do I start?
Getting started using our API is quite easy! I will show you how I would start a Screenshot test using CrossBrowserTesting’s API! In this example I will be writing our API calls in Python 3.7 using the Requests library. Here is a guide to installing your Python environment if needed: Python Installation Guide
To install the Requests library, open up a terminal and run this command:
pip install requests
We will need to get our login credentials so that we can launch our tests from our account. You can find these by scrolling to the bottom of this page
You will see that we have passed our login information directly into the URL that we are talking to. This is called basic authentication; this allows us to securely communicate with CrossBrowserTesting’s infrastructure.
Setting up the test
Before we begin structuring our API request, we will need the proper URL endpoint so that we can talk to CrossBrowserTesting’s service. For screenshots this will be:
crossbrowsertesting.com/api/v3/screenshots
After that we will begin writing out our API request! We will need to get a list of device and browser combinations that we would like to use for our tests. The way I prefer to get these is by going to this screenshots page and clicking the TRY button. Do not worry this may take a minute to load in all of the results.
Once we have all of the results, I have picked out the api_name parameter for the device and the browser combination for a couple different devices. Here’s some listed below:
| Device/Browser Combo | Device | Browser |
| Pixel 2 with Chrome 74 | Pixel2-And90 | MblChrome74 |
| iPhone XR sim with Safari 12 | iPhoneXRSim | MblSafari12.0 |
| Mac OSX 10.14 with Firefox 67 | Mac10.14 | FF67 |
| Windows 10 with Chrome 75 | Win10 | Chrome75x64 |
Let’s build the test
Now that we have all the required components to start our API screenshot test, let’s write the test!
First, we need to import all the packages that we will be using in our test:
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import json import time from requests import post, get |
The json package is used for parsing our data that we get back from CrossBrowserTesting. The time package is used for setting delays used in our test. And finally, the requests package is used to send the request to CrossBrowserTesting.
Next, we will add all of the parameters that we will need to let CrossBrowserTesting who we are and what we are trying to do:
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#Your CrossBrowserTesting credentials user = YOUR_EMAIL password = YOUR_AUTHKEY #Screenshot parameters test_url = "https://google.com/" devices_list = "Pixel2-And90|MblChrome74, iPhoneXRSim|MblSafari12.0, Mac10.14|FF67, Win10|Chrome75X64" |
We have added our CrossBrowserTesting credentials that will be used to access our account. We have also added our devices that we want to test as well as the URL that we want to check.
Now let’s send the request with all of our parameters to CrossBrowserTesting to begin the test:
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#Send the request to CrossBrowserTesting to start the test request = get("https://"+user+":"+authkey+"@crossbrowsertesting.com/api/v3/screenshots/?browsers="+devices_list+"&url="+test_url) results = request.json() |
This takes all of our information that we set earlier and put into one URL string. This data is then sent to CrossBrowserTesting and handled to begin the test!
Our next part we will create a loop to check if the test is finished every 10 seconds:
This may appear a bit lengthy and complicated, but I promise you it is actually quite simple! First, we set some variables to keep the state of our test and get our current test ID to check it.
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#active test active_test = True #Used to store finished test results finished_test_results = None #Test ID test_id = results['screenshot_test_id'] #Check if test is complete, if not try again in 10s while active_test: print ("Checking if test is still active") #Send HTTP request to CrossBrowserTesting to see if test is still running request = get("https://"+user+":"+authkey+"@crossbrowsertesting.com/api/v3/screenshots/"+str(test_id)) results = request.json() #Status of the test test_status = results['versions'][0]['active'] #Check active parameter if is false, if so stop the loop if test_status is False: active_test = False #Put test results into finished test results finished_test_results = results['versions'][0] print("Test is complete!") else: print ("Test is still running, checking again in 10 seconds") #Wait 10 seconds and retry loop time.sleep(10) |
Inside of our while loop you will see that we send a request to CrossBrowserTesting every time to see if the test is still running. If it is, we wait 10 seconds and check again.
When the test is completed, we will then get the pass/fail results and the URL of our test:
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#Test results URL test_url = finished_test_results['show_results_web_url'] #Get pass/fail from test results test_results = finished_test_results['result_count'] pass_results = str(test_results['successful']) fail_results = str(test_results['failed']) #Show test results print ("Pass: "+pass_results+" Failed: "+fail_results) print("To view these results visit: "+test_url) |
This will show us at the end of test how well our test did as well as let us check it in CrossBrowserTesting’s web application.
Finally, here is our complete test that will run everything we went through
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import json import time from requests import post, get #Your CrossBrowserTesting credentials user = YOUR_EMAIL password = YOUR_AUTHKEY #Screenshot parameters devices_list = "Pixel2-And90|MblChrome74, iPhoneXRSim|MblSafari12.0, Mac10.14|FF67, Win10|Chrome75X64" test_url = "https://google.com/" #Send the request to CrossBrowserTesting to start the test request = get("https://"+user+":"+authkey+"@crossbrowsertesting.com/api/v3/screenshots/?browsers="+devices_list+"&url="+test_url) results = request.json() #Wait 15 seconds for test to run before checking print ("Waiting 15 seconds for test to begin processing...") time.sleep(15) #active test active_test = True #Used to store finished test results finished_test_results = None #Test ID test_id = results['screenshot_test_id'] #Check if test is complete, if not try again in 10s while active_test: print ("Checking if test is still active") #Send HTTP request to CBT to see if test is still running request = get("https://"+user+":"+authkey+"@crossbrowsertesting.com/api/v3/screenshots/"+str(test_id)) results = request.json() #Status of the test test_status = results['versions'][0]['active'] #Check active parameter if is false, if so stop the loop if test_status is False: active_test = False #Put test results into finished test results finished_test_results = results['versions'][0] print("Test is complete!") else: print ("Test is still running, checking again in 10 seconds") #Wait 10 seconds and retry loop time.sleep(10) #Test results URL test_url = finished_test_results['show_results_web_url'] #Get pass/fail from test results test_results = finished_test_results['result_count'] pass_results = str(test_results['successful']) fail_results = str(test_results['failed']) #Show test results print ("Pass: "+pass_results+" Failed: "+fail_results) print("To view these results visit: "+test_url) |
Running the test:
Now that we have everything set up it is time to actually run our test! With python this is super simple, and will let us quickly get this thing going.
Open up a terminal on your device:
Next we need to go to where ever we saved our test file at. For mine I saved it in my OneDrive folder on my desktop.
Time to run the test:
Running the test is as simple as typing python and then the filename.
python
test.py
If you are running this on OSX you may need to use python3
After doing so you will start to see the test run and see it complete!